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#99: Cannabinoids, Immortal Cells, Baby Teeth, and a Passion for Helping Others
114 Plays2 years ago
How do you manage EHS at a company that produces cannabinoids and other psychedelic drugs to try to help with diseases? Chris Garza walks us through his inspirational story that starts with a very early passion for helping others and the world with his work. He started his career in the lab working on stem cell therapy and moved on to overseeing hazardous material disposal from electrical transformers. Chris is now the EHS Manager for Benuvia Manufacturing with over 13 years of experience, and Principal Consultant for Feather and Mane EHS Consultants.
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Transcript
Introduction: Meet Chris Garza
00:00:08
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded December 15th, 2022. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer. And today my guest is Chris Garza, EHS Manager for Banuvia Manufacturing and Principal Consultant for Feather & Main EHS Consultant. Chris is joining us today from Round Rock, Texas. Welcome to the show, Chris. Hi, thanks for having me, Jill.
From Comics to EHS: Chris's Origin Story
00:00:35
Speaker
So Chris, um,
00:00:38
Speaker
Based on our previous conversation before we agreed to do this podcast recording, I believe you said your story with EHS starts somewhere in a box of comic books. Do I remember that correctly?
00:00:53
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, it's funny to think about it now. You know, they always ask you what you want to be when you grow up. What do you want to do? All that stuff. And, you know, my hero was always my dad.
00:01:09
Speaker
And my dad gave me this box of comic books. This is what he had all the time, what I was able to play with. And reading through all of them, you know, one of the ones that connected with me was Spider-Man. And I wanted to be a scientist and a hero, somebody who helped people.
00:01:35
Speaker
And it's funny how I didn't really know all through my life how that was going to play out until I got into my career. And now I get to do just that. I get to help people and help the community around me and hopefully the world.
00:01:56
Speaker
That's awesome. And it sounds like you did it through the door of science, you know, thinking back to Spider-Man. So what did that look like?
Educational Path: Biochemistry and Research
00:02:06
Speaker
I mean, you get your inspiration from your dad and your comic books. You're a little kid. What's the next step you take that sort of leads you into a life of dedicated to health and safety? Well, he was good at everything. My dad was great at everything.
00:02:25
Speaker
And I followed suit. I tried everything. I learned a little bit of everything. I eventually went into life guarding when working in high school. And that felt, that felt good at the time. And I did it through most of college and in college I got into the lab finally and was able to start working in the lab.
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah, so what were you studying that got you into a lab, Chris? I was studying biochemistry. It was funny. I was going for something to do with what went into our bodies. I was really concerned with, you know, thinking about what we were putting in our bodies, how it was affecting us. So I wanted to know about nutrition.
00:03:16
Speaker
And more than just what to eat, the right things to eat, I wanted to know how the molecules of it were going into us and affecting us. So I went into a weird track that was called molecular and experimental nutrition.
00:03:31
Speaker
Okay. I have not heard of this before. Okay. And it's funny because every time it's on my transcripts, uh, as molecular experimental nutrition and looking at it, it's, it's, it's biochemistry. It's just what the molecules do in your body. Uh, and that put me into a biochemistry lab with one of the, one of the best that was at our school. I was working as an undergrad, uh, there, I got to work there for three years.
00:04:00
Speaker
And where did you go to college, Chris? I went to Texas A&M in College Station. I grew up, well, I grew up all over. I was an Air Force kid. My mom was in the Air Force. She took us all around the Southeast to Colorado, to Memphis, Tennessee, to Gulfport, Mississippi. And finally, we landed in South Padre Island area.
00:04:29
Speaker
in this little town called Los Fresno. So I got to spend high school and middle school there. And then after that I went over to Texas A&M.
00:04:42
Speaker
Okay. Okay. So you're finally, you're in the lab and are you thinking, gosh, I found my groove and this is answering some of those questions I had? I did. And I thought that that was going to be what I was going to do. I thought that I was going to do experiments for the rest of my life and do these cool things with
00:05:04
Speaker
chemicals and chemistry and all this fun lab equipment I mean being in the lab was it was a lot of fun all the new stuff that you got to see every day it was it was fun I will say though I didn't enjoy doing any animal studies
00:05:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean animals, animals contribute to science, right? So yeah, do you want to talk about that? What was that like? Or what did you do?
Early Career: Immortal Cells and Stem Cells
00:05:36
Speaker
So we worked with mice and rabbits. We even had bats and frogs. And one of the things we were looking at was fish oil and what it did for cancer.
00:05:55
Speaker
Fish oil. OK. Yeah. Yeah. We did a comparison between fish oil and corn oil. We also used these types of mice that had some genes knocked out. And different ones, these were very interesting, was the designer mice, how they had different genes knocked out. Different genes were overexpressed.
00:06:25
Speaker
It was really cool to see. Our study showed that taking fish oil over corn oil had an anti-inflammatory effect for these cancer markers that we were looking at. And I spent three years working on all those. I was one of the few in our school to do an undergrad research project in the lab.
00:06:52
Speaker
Because most of the time you have to be in a master's program to get your own project that you're working on. So anyone who's listening right now who also consumes fish oil for an anti-inflammatory response, it sounds, Chris, like in part we can thank you for some of that research.
00:07:13
Speaker
Yeah, yes. Dr. Chapkin, the lab that I worked in, he did a lot of work on that. We had a lot of papers produced on it. Fabulous. Yeah, so what else about the lab and or animals? You started talking about animal studies. Yes.
00:07:36
Speaker
So after I got out of college, I was looking for what I was going to do at that point. I knew I wanted to be in the lab, but I didn't know what labs did outside of academia. I had no idea. So at this first job, you make an immortal cell.
00:08:04
Speaker
immortal. It's an immortal cell. This thing, I mean, you use the word immoral, immoral, immortal. And, and, you know, think about I've already mentioned comic books.
00:08:19
Speaker
Yeah, I was just going to say, this sounds a lot like Spider-Man. OK. You talk about a word used in comic books that strikes intrigue. They said, well, you can make this immortal cell that will help us out by being able to detect certain toxins in food and in biological systems like our bodies.
00:08:46
Speaker
And the technology apparently had been used for a while, but they were starting to try to use it for, at present, the viruses that were coming out, like H1N1 and RSV and African swine flu. So they tasked me with making, these things are called hybrid domas.
00:09:14
Speaker
And what you do is you take a mouse and you give it whatever you want them to make antibodies for, whatever you want to start an inflammatory response in their body. And they start making these antibodies against it.
00:09:35
Speaker
Then once they're making these antibodies, you can harvest the spleen, take their B cells, and fuse them with a cancer cell.
00:09:48
Speaker
So once they fuse together, now they're this immortal cell. It has the characteristics of immortality from the cancer cell. And then it has the characteristics of the antibody factory from the B cell. So now till the end of time, the cell will sit there and pump out these antibodies.
00:10:12
Speaker
And from there, you can harvest them, purify them up, attach them to some sort of, you know, Sephros bead or anything. And then you can run a sample over it. Like let's say that you were.
00:10:28
Speaker
concerned what was in your Wheaties. And you can run those Wheaties through this thing. And at the end, it'll tell you whether or not you have a toxin in it if you were looking for this toxin. Fascinating. Yeah. And we were doing the same thing for African Swine Flu and RSV and H1N1. It was really cool.
00:10:55
Speaker
So do you think that the work that you did there, Chris, I mean, I know that we're, science is telling us we're maybe a year from a vaccine for RSV. Is this like, would this be considered like some of the foundational work that science has been doing to get to that kind of point?
00:11:12
Speaker
This would be considered the foundational work of detection. Got it. So we're detecting it but they do kind of do the same thing with their vaccine although I know it's changed a lot with RNA and I've been out of the game.
00:11:30
Speaker
uh too long for the new technologies that have come along with that one but this stuff was all detection of it so detecting whether or not somebody had it or one of the other things that we did was all these mycotoxins um these mycotoxins that are produced they can negatively affect animals and people uh in their food so there was these there were these different mycotoxins that i had that i also made
00:11:59
Speaker
these antibodies for and put them into kits and they were quick kits that you could take out to like a food and feed area and they could prep the sample right there and run it over this thing and read it.
00:12:16
Speaker
Fascinating. I mean, this is important work, Chris. How did you feel about your career at this point? I mean, you set out in our conversation today talking about, you know, you wanted to make a difference, help people, help the world. What were you thinking at the time when you were doing this kind of work? I felt amazing about it. I loved doing it.
00:12:39
Speaker
Unfortunately, it was one of those things where it was so much fun and because it is easy to love doing it, that it didn't pay very good for my first job out of school.
00:12:56
Speaker
There's always that. Okay. And I did have a family that I wanted to start and I had, you know, goals for that one. And I ended up getting an opportunity. I started working a night job while I was doing that one. And the night job was doing dental pulp, stem cell harvesting and research.
00:13:21
Speaker
Holy cats. All right, Chris, you're gonna have to unwind that one. You just said dental pulp stem cell. Okay, yeah. Unwind all those words for our audience because I don't think anybody said that before here.
Transition to EHS: Safety and Compliance
00:13:36
Speaker
And it's funny because it's a night job too, right? So I start this job at like 6 p.m. and don't get out until midnight.
00:13:42
Speaker
Uh, but what, it's this company called bio Eden and there's other companies that do this, not very many of them. Uh, but they discovered that they can harvest stem cells out of teeth, like baby teeth that kids lose. So you can take the tooth that your kid loses and we used to put it into milk.
00:14:09
Speaker
And it had to be sent to us at a certain, within a certain timeframe. And we would take it out and then we would go through and scrape these teeth and scrape the inside of these teeth and put them into our matrix that we had. And it would grow up these stem cells.
00:14:34
Speaker
We grow them to a certain point and then we would go through and freeze them down, cryogenically freeze them down so they could have them for later.
00:14:46
Speaker
Okay, so for all of us who are listening and wondering, how'd you get the teeth? I mean, did you have like a call center saying, hey, you want to donate some baby teeth? Like, how did how did the actual getting of the teeth go? Or were you not on that end? We always made fun of it. We always joked about this at home as well. And it's funny as there was you can do it with adults as well for their wisdom teeth.
00:15:08
Speaker
So there was a few times that I made runs to a dentist office and collected teeth. The dentist put them in the milk. The dentist gave them to me. I didn't go through and physically take them out myself.
00:15:24
Speaker
Yeah, so we had a Salesforce that would go through and tell people about this and let them know that this was a thing that you could do. And from there, they would partner with different dental groups and they would send us the tea. So we would get these
00:15:45
Speaker
these FedEx packages we had and we would get them by you know tens sometimes in a day you had these 20 packages that came in and you would go through and just harvest you'd be in the lab sitting there looking at each one of these and harvesting them
00:16:02
Speaker
This is next level tooth fairy. It absolutely was. It absolutely was. But it was really cool because we could make them differentiate into different types of cells. By the end, we were making them into liver cells, pathogens. They were going into bone cells. They were turning into bone cells and cartilage.
00:16:33
Speaker
cartilage as well. We can also make him go into fat cells, but you know, I don't, I don't know, that wasn't really used for that one. Yeah, so the end product that you're talking about, I don't know if that's the right terminology, I'm just saying end product.
00:16:48
Speaker
Is that something that's still being done and actually utilized or is this something that's still an experiment phase as far as you know? They're still doing studies on it. So we supported clinical trials in mostly South America.
00:17:04
Speaker
Uh, and they were a lot on cleft palate where we had really good results from taking. So it was, it's really nice that you hear about people talking about a, uh, making a genetic using genetics to make a cure for somebody, uh, that is, that is specific to them.
00:17:30
Speaker
This is using your own cells to fix things specific to you. So the worry about your body rejecting him and things like that was taking down a whole lot on it. And these cleft palate studies that we were doing, we had a lot of success in that it formed it to a matrix and they put the matrix in there for the cleft palate and they had a lot of them that closed up.
00:17:56
Speaker
So that was really cool. We also had some where we were looking at diabetes and seeing if we could cure that and the patients who took it, their quality of life really went up. It's not a quantitative study or quantitative result.
00:18:17
Speaker
But it was still good to see and good to hear. It made me feel really good doing those things as well. Yeah. I mean, that's helping around the world, Chris. That's awesome. We did. We got stuff from South America, Mexico, the US, the UK. We were in all those different markets and they were sending us all their teeth.
00:18:47
Speaker
Amazing who knows so I got that night job. I did it at night for about half a year before They gave me the opportunity to come work for them full-time Okay for a you know a very a great increase in my quality of life so I took it and I got to work there for five years and I'm gonna make they closed down
00:19:16
Speaker
Yeah, and so when you're working there for five years, you were doing what you were describing, or, or whether different facets to that job that were leading you kind of more into that EHS realm. So both companies, small companies, less than. So the first company was about 30 employees. Next company was about 15.
00:19:38
Speaker
and working with a small company, you do everything. It's fun. I love doing everything. I told you at the start of this about my dad and how he was great at everything. I always liked just doing the IT part of it, doing the marketing part of it, doing the customer service part of it, and doing everything. In that first job,
00:20:06
Speaker
Well, there was the hazardous waste part of it. There was the hazmat's response on it. I really didn't know that these were like safety terms at that point, like a has whopper. I didn't know what that was, but I knew that when this chemical dropped on the floor, like you cleaned it up this way.
00:20:33
Speaker
So starting with that at the first job Going through and doing the hazardous waste and then the second job I had already done it at the first job and done it in the lab and college in college Before that so it was just easy for me to say like oh y'all are trying to get rid of that Well, this is the way that you do it Like oh really because we've been just doing it this way which you know this way is not not the right way and
00:20:59
Speaker
Right, right, right. Or you're just like, stop doing that. Stop doing that. Can't be thrown that in the trash. Exactly. Stop doing that. This is how it's supposed to be, how it's supposed to be done. So becoming the lab manager over at the stem cell research place, the dental pulp stem cell research place, which is an important distinction to make when you're talking about stem cells.
00:21:27
Speaker
It's becoming the lab manager there. I was in charge of all of that, in charge of this. At that point, I was giving talks on the hazards of liquid nitrogen from our liquid nitrogen doers, our cryogenics that we were doing there.
00:21:46
Speaker
I was telling them how to use the autoclave and you know the autoclave is a thing that heats up you know super high and sterilizes these things you know it's can build up pressure in it basically if it gets some of its pressure relief and stuff blocked it turns into a bomb
00:22:04
Speaker
And I bet you learned a lot about biological safety cabinets if you were working under what people classically call a fume hood. Oh yeah. Yep. Both jobs. Both jobs for biologics. A lot of biologics. Some had animal safety in there. But I still had no idea what I was doing.
00:22:28
Speaker
yet that I didn't realize that I was doing the job of an EHS manager because I had no idea that there was even such a thing.
00:22:41
Speaker
Okay, yeah, so drumroll here on when you when when that awakening occurs, so you're at that job and then what so they go out of business luckily we had my Chief safety officer at the time had a good enough relationship with us where he gave us about a four to six month warning that this was gonna happen and
Banuvia and Research on Cannabinoids
00:23:05
Speaker
So I started looking around and I was looking for lab manager positions. I'm a lab manager. This is what I do. I work in the lab. And I came across this job that said environmental lab manager.
00:23:28
Speaker
I was like, I can I can do that. I mean, it's not biologics. It's not something I've never done it before, though. It should be all right. And I applied to it with this company called Solomon. They did transformers and electrical grid equipment.
00:23:51
Speaker
Okay. Very different from anything you've done to date. Yes. Yes. So come to find out that these transformers, back in the day, they used to make them with a fluid inside that had PCBs in them, which is polychlorinated biphenyls.
00:24:14
Speaker
and it was a not a good a not good no no they're um you know they're uh what's the word is bio
00:24:25
Speaker
Oh. Bio, they build up in the environment. Bio-accumulator. They're a bio-accumulator, right? They don't go anywhere. They only break down from the sun over a long... It takes them... I want to say it's like decades. Don't quote me on that. It takes them a long time to get out of there. Bio-accumulator. And then it's shown that they affect the...
00:24:54
Speaker
the breeding of certain animals. There are suspected carcinogen at this point, but the talk I always gave was that it starts out small in the smaller animals of krill and shrimp, and it ends up accumulating in the body fat until it's gotten all the way up to orcas.
00:25:17
Speaker
And now they show that Orcas have lower birth rates because these PCBs are messing them up. So I found out that with these Transformers,
00:25:34
Speaker
Well, I think it was, well, back in the day, they used to put this special fluid in some transformers where they needed, it was an option. It was an option like you pay for leather seats on a car. You could get PCBs in your transformer fluid and they were really good because they had a, they were really good at taking on heat and dispersing it.
00:26:05
Speaker
So even there was a town that Westinghouse had gifted a bunch of these Transformers because the town had a fire, something like that, that was related to these Transformers, that they gifted them a whole bunch of these Transformers for PCVs in them.
00:26:23
Speaker
I mean, so with good intention that turns into catastrophic results. Absolutely. Yeah. So do we know, does this community have really high rates of cancer? No, no. So they took them out when they figured out all the stuff with them. They took them out. So that was part of my job was looking at all these. I had a team that looked at all these transformers that rolled in because we did, we recycled transformers and we repaired them.
00:26:55
Speaker
So when they came in, my team would look at them to see what year they were made. And depending on the year, they would fall into the suspect list and then we'd go through and sample them and sample them and run them on our lab equipment for PCBs.
00:27:15
Speaker
So how did you protect your employees and how did you decide how to protect them when they're doing that? So they had a whole bunny suit that they wore when they were doing it complete with gloves. PCBs will go through latex.
00:27:37
Speaker
So we had nitrile gloves for them. We had everything needed to be looked at all the time. We needed to make sure there was no holes in it. That oil from those transformers, it just gets into everything too. Yeah. And what kind of respirator or art was, is it not? No, it doesn't really aerosolize. It doesn't, it doesn't go into the air very easy. They tend to be kind of heavy.
00:28:04
Speaker
Yeah, okay, so we didn't have to worry about anything there as long as you know, somebody wasn't Was it licking the transformer? We were good Yeah, and washing their hands before they had lunch exactly exactly. So we had a lot of procedures on on how to On how to decontaminate things like that, which was basically just washing
00:28:29
Speaker
Right. But going into that, so I started doing this environmental lab, environmental lab coordinator, or manager. And
00:28:43
Speaker
They said, well, you know, you can do this and you're good at it. So how about doing the safety thing for us?
Public Speaking and Community Advocacy
00:28:51
Speaker
You know, we need safety on our forklifts. We need safety for our slings and hoists that we have everywhere.
00:28:59
Speaker
uh you know these guys are working there's a bunch of ergonomics was going through and tearing these things apart we have bombs so when these transformers come in uh one of the ways that i got involved in safety on it was uh one of the ways i got involved in safety was that the transformers when they came in especially these old ones
00:29:22
Speaker
their pressure relief valves can be can be just gone, like to the point where they've fused in to where they're no longer relieving any pressure. So now these transformers have turned into big bombs. And you got to get you got to get to the fluid somehow.
00:29:42
Speaker
Right. So our our procedure for it started out with us putting a bunch of straps over the top. I don't know if you've ever looked at a transformer on a power line and kind of seen how they're built, but they're big cylinders. Yeah, I can picture it. Oh, so we put a bunch of straps over the top that were strapped so it could. Yes.
00:30:11
Speaker
Yep. And we go through and undo the screws and go through and pop it to relieve the pressure. Oh, man, that sounds tense. It was really tense. So one of the things we looked at was going through and taking a drill with a screw, a self tapping screw.
00:30:38
Speaker
and putting it into the side of these transformers at the top, where once you did it, the fluid wouldn't just come spurting out. And they had tried it before, but when they did it, they had a flash occur with it.
00:30:59
Speaker
Sounds like that would happen because of the friction of the bit, I suppose. So that's what we were thinking. But looking at it further, it wasn't the bit that was doing it. It wasn't the self-tapping screw that was doing it. It was that we weren't using intrinsically safe tools.
00:31:21
Speaker
So the motor inside had a spark, the gas coming out that right when you made the hole, that gas would expunge out at the drill and that spark would hit it. And that's what caused the flash. So once we started using intrinsically safe drills, this became a really good way to do it.
00:31:46
Speaker
So Chris, for anyone who's listening who might not know what intrinsically safe tools are, do you want to explain that? Yeah, so they're built in a way that keeps any sort of spark, anything that could cause a ignition, it keeps it all housed and contained.
00:32:08
Speaker
So that way, if you're using it next to a, let's say that you have a flammable atmosphere that you're in, you're using a bunch of ethanol. You're doing your ethanol filling station for a food and drug place, and it's just this room where you fill ethanol in. Everything in that room would be intrinsically safe.
00:32:30
Speaker
Yeah, same is true with dusty environments where dust could be explosive. It's very, very common in the grain handling industry. Yes. And I'm just thinking of a sugar beet processing facility where certain pieces of the process, intrinsically safe tools and equipment needed to be used in those areas too. So it's not uncommon in our professional practice, but it's not like everywhere you go.
00:33:00
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it's funny you bring up the grain and dust and that's right after this I ended up in a supplement company for food and drug that we had to, luckily the intrinsically safe stuff came over from my experience there at Solomon into that next company.
00:33:30
Speaker
The Solomon one, though, just a few things to mention there, I think y'all would find interesting is these Transformers come in from the countryside. They come in from everywhere. We had them coming in from all over Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana. They would come in with bullet holes in them.
00:33:57
Speaker
Oh, because people like, this is like a for funsies thing. Let's go shoot up a transformer so we can watch it blow. I had no idea until I started this job that that was a thing, but it happened more than, more than it should for sure. Wow.
00:34:14
Speaker
You had them come in with bullet holes in them. You had them come in where they had been tampered, where the bushing looked like it had been hit off by something. I had no idea how anybody had done any of this. So then, in those cases, had the PCBs leaked out if they contained it?
00:34:34
Speaker
If they contained it, they would have. They did. They did. And then that's a whole remediation part. Right. I got very good at all my environmental stuff there at Solid. I bet you did. I bet you did. Working on SPCCs and doing my above ground storage tanks and underground storage tanks. Yeah. So in those areas where people were shooting up transformers, there's probably little mini cleanup sites in those areas.
00:35:04
Speaker
Yep.
00:35:05
Speaker
Yeah, I got to go talk to linemen about and give presentations on PCBs. That's why I talked about the orcas and the bioaccumulation of it and how it could affect them and their families that when they saw this that they needed to be careful and they needed to decontaminate themselves or put on PPE before messing with these transformers because they didn't want to take it home to their kids or their dogs or their animals, any of them.
00:35:34
Speaker
So I got, I actually got, and that's the first time, Solomon was the first time that I figured out that there was such thing as an EHS manager. And I started doing the job there. And after doing that for a while, they decided that they were going to move their company up about an hour away north.
00:36:03
Speaker
Does it sound like a good work-life balance? Exactly, exactly. And I said earlier when I was talking about my first job that I wanted to start a family, all that. So by this time at Solomon, I had my first kid.
Entrepreneurial Ventures: Feather & Main
00:36:23
Speaker
I had my son and my wife at home. My parents actually live with us at the house too.
00:36:32
Speaker
You have a multi-generational family. We do. We do. And it works out great. I have a beautiful understanding wife who is very appreciative of my parents and my family. So I kind of hit the jackpot there because it could have been a whole lot different with trying to keep the family together with my wife.
00:37:02
Speaker
But family is really important to me. And having to do the drive to spend more time away from them, I didn't want to do it. So I found a job being a safety director. This job was looking for all. It was just a safety director. That was the job title. There was no environmental put in there.
00:37:30
Speaker
Except it contained it. Yeah, so many of us have had so many different job titles that didn't include the things you eventually ended up doing. And I think that's really because so many leaders still don't understand our work function, you know? And so it's like, we're just gonna throw this safety title on there, but it's also gonna be environmental and it's also gonna be health and it's also gonna be DOT and it's also gonna be, you know, name it. Yeah. But they, you know,
00:37:58
Speaker
The cool thing about our profession, and when I meet other people from our profession, I find this true, is that we are good at everything. They find out, management finds out that we're good at this. We're good at this. And they're like, well, can you help out with that project? It's like, well, sure. I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out.
00:38:30
Speaker
uh but yeah so i went to this other place as a safety director which you know included the environmental as well and they were a supplement company
00:38:41
Speaker
They were a supplement company. And to this point, I had always felt really good about what I was doing. Even at Solomon doing the electrical grid stuff, we were helping people without power. We were repairing them, getting them out quick. When hurricanes hit or some other natural disaster happened that wiped out the electrical grid of a place, they would send us all their stuff. We'd go through and repair it. A lot of the times, we would stay overnight.
00:39:11
Speaker
and try to repair all this stuff and send it back out to them so they could get their power on as soon as they could. So I was always feeling really good about what I was doing in this place. I went to the supplement company and we got to see a lot of people that had been, their life was improved by this as well. I know supplements is a whole topic in itself, whether or not they work or they don't.
00:39:40
Speaker
But the placebo effect, or if it's not a placebo effect, has a lot to do with it. If somebody says they take this pill and it improves their quality of life and it's not hurting them, then it's good.
00:39:54
Speaker
Uh, and I got to, I got to see a lot and I got my first taste of what it was like being in food. A whole different animal. Okay. It was, it was a whole different animal being in food. Uh, I didn't feel like it was, to me, it wasn't as interesting as the other stuff that I had done.
00:40:20
Speaker
but I did get to learn a lot and I and I at every place I go to I also just usually just fall in love with the people and this place was no different they were they were awesome I really liked working with every one of them getting to know everything about them it was it was a lot of fun on that aspect
00:40:45
Speaker
But it doesn't sound like that one lasted huh that one that one did not Just because I always had questions to kind of where we were going Things like that and I Also had one big thing bothering me in all of my career. Okay Which was that I had always been left to figure out most of the things on my own
00:41:13
Speaker
I had been left to figure out, OK, well, this is the problem. This is our safety problem. This is our safety issue. What do we do about it? And then through my research, through everything, then I would have come up with an answer. And I never got.
00:41:30
Speaker
I never got any sort of pure confirmation. Yeah, I mean that's so common in our profession and that piece is unfortunate that so many of us are solo operators and it's also why many of us are very well networked outside of our organizations
Mentorship and Career Reflections
00:41:49
Speaker
because we need that. We need somebody to be able to say like, am I on the right
00:41:55
Speaker
What do you think of this? And so is that what you set out to do is to find a mentor, if you will? I did. I did. And I had an opportunity where somebody contacted me and said, hey, I need a EHS manager under me. I am drowning. And they were making the shift to a project manager on the operations side.
00:42:24
Speaker
So they had, and they have just a plethora of experience. They're from the, we're in the CDC for years. They've worked at Gilead when it was just starting up. They're really good. And I agreed to come work with him.
00:42:47
Speaker
I have learned or at least got confirmation in the things that I'm doing in this past year and a half that I felt like my career and my confidence has skyrocketed at this point. That's beautiful. What does this particular company do where you have the opportunity to have that person?
00:43:15
Speaker
So this is the company I'm at now, it's called Banuvia. And they're, what they want to do, I love the mission behind it. How they're doing it is so interesting as well. They are using
00:43:36
Speaker
cannabinoids or cannabis and psychedelic drugs to try to improve diseases. So we're using cannabis. We have the only, uh, the only FDA approved THC drug on the market, which is called syndros, which is used for cancer patients and HIV patients experiencing anorexia.
00:44:07
Speaker
And they take our products and it helps with pain and it also helps make them hungry so that they're able to eat. Uh, that one's, that one's, it's really cool. Uh, yep. That's, that's helping humanity, Chris, for sure.
00:44:27
Speaker
I feel like it and I feel I, you know, I don't want to get into the conversation about, you know, drugs and all that other things. Uh, but I do want to just, uh, the, the, the psychedelic part of it. We make MDMA, which is ecstasy. Uh, we make ecstasy onsite the, um, and LSD.
00:44:56
Speaker
as well. We're slated to make psilocybin. So we have these things scheduled with the DEA. We have quota with the DEA to do these things. And the goal is that we're feeding clinical trials. We only sell the clinical trials. We're only feeding these clinical trials. They're dealing with
00:45:20
Speaker
We're dealing with the, God, I blanked out for it, but depression, PTSD, anxiety, they're dosing with these to figure out if they can help these people that suffer from these ailments. Wow.
00:45:46
Speaker
Gosh, Chris, this has been an interesting career path, right? I mean, outside of the transformer industry, you've really stayed true to your roots in a family of biochemistry, right?
00:46:03
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's beautiful. And a lot on leading research, including where you are today, which is, which is fascinating and, and hopefully proves to be life changing for people who are, who are, who are suffering. Yeah. I really, I really believe in what we're doing right now here at Banuvia.
00:46:29
Speaker
And I really hope that it can, I really hope that it does what they hope it will do. Yeah. Yeah. So at your current position, are you doing a little bit, a little bit of E, a little bit of H, a little bit of S? Yes. Yes. I get to do it all again. And it's on a whole, a whole different level now. Cause we have LSD is a potent compound.
00:46:54
Speaker
Right. It's so you there's other safety things that are involved with the potent compound stuff. And my boss is has been a great mentor on that one. He worked with his he's very smart. He worked with some very smart people in the past that have built this whole safety program around potent compounds.
00:47:13
Speaker
where it's potent compounds and also compounds that don't even have any toxicity studies on them yet. Normally, you would look at a chemical, you'd look at the SDS and say, okay, we need to do this and this and this. Well, some of these chemicals, what they developed them for, they don't have an SDS.
00:47:35
Speaker
They don't have any LD5, so they don't have any talk studies that say that at this level it'll kill you or harm you. So they built this whole program up on how to handle these things and learning about that has been great.
00:47:54
Speaker
learning the DEA stuff, the DEA, you know, how they regulate the pharma industry and how they regulate these drugs, how they regulate marijuana and these psychedelic drugs has been really interesting. Yeah. And for anyone who doesn't quite know what DEA is or DEA compliance, which is what you're talking about, Chris, DEA stands for
00:48:22
Speaker
Oh, yeah, the Drug Enforcement Administration. Yeah. They're on side every two months. Okay, right. Okay, so this is good. You know, in our work as EHS professionals,
00:48:38
Speaker
you know, the automatic one that everybody goes to is OSHA, right? And then the next one people think of probably next is, oh, maybe EPA or the local equivalent, you know, maybe DOT depending on the industry that you're in, maybe MSHA depending on the industry that you're in.
00:48:55
Speaker
And, you know, DEA is yet another one. And, you know, we think about a regulatory compliance, you know, FDA, another one if you're in the food industry. And you're talking, Chris, about the DEA and onsite every two months. Like, that's a lot compared to say, oh, OSHA. Yeah. Yeah. And so they're looking for, they're looking for specific things. I'm imagining you have to produce some pretty interesting paper trails and they're doing some onsite auditing.
00:49:24
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Every bit needs to be accounted for. Right. They call it.
00:49:32
Speaker
It's not diverting. They call it diverting. So you can't have anything. You don't want anything diverted from the chain. So the DEA has this chain that they say, OK, it's produced. Now it needs to go here. Now it needs to go here. If it ever leaves the chain, it's saying that it's been diverted. And that's a huge issue. Sure. It's got to be accounted for the entire time.
00:50:02
Speaker
Yeah, and with the DEA, you're talking about jail time at that point. You're talking about something much worse than just a fine.
00:50:12
Speaker
Fascinating work, Chris, fascinating. You know, I heard you mentioning maybe two jobs back. Oh, maybe it was when you were working with the Transformers and you said you went into communities and you did some speaking engagements. Is that a piece that kind of launched what we might call public speaking or training for you? And is that something that you like to do?
00:50:40
Speaker
Grown for you in your career. I like to do it. I loved going out and meeting the Lineman the guys out there working in our communities to keep the power on I Loved helping them talking to them and that did open up my my public speaking part of it I Haven't got to do it as much as I would like to
00:51:07
Speaker
Sometimes, you know, you get that. I mean, we all, we all get it and it's a hot topic in our, in our career is the imposter syndrome type thing where you don't feel like you should even be speaking about this thing. So that's probably been part of what's kept me from doing too much of it, but.
00:51:27
Speaker
in an effort to get out into my community more, my number one value is my family. And what I think really supports your family is being in touch with the community around them and being a positive influence on that community. Make it, you know, it's cliche, but be the change you want to see.
00:51:57
Speaker
kind of thing, right? That's right. It's not cliche. And that's beautiful, Chris. And I have a feeling that we're going to talk about your consulting work now in that regard. So if anyone remembers when I introduced Chris, his second gig, if you will, is a principal consultant for an organization called Feather and Main EHS Consultants. So talk about what that is and what does that mean in your region?
00:52:24
Speaker
So I put together Feather and Main to reach out to my community. I felt like the work that I'm doing now, I believe in it. I love it. It's a lot of fun. But I feel like there's a lot of underserved small businesses out there, like the small labs that I worked for coming up.
00:52:50
Speaker
that are doing the things where I came in and told them, you shouldn't be dumping that there, or you shouldn't be doing this, or you had your employees move that whole fume hood by themselves. So there's a lot of those underserved companies that can't afford a full-time EHS person, maybe can't even afford some of the bigger consulting groups that are out there.
00:53:20
Speaker
So I came up with this consulting group for the purpose of positively affecting my community and helping them out. I want to know more of the people who work and live around me.
00:53:41
Speaker
I want to know, I want to help them come home because some of these people could be my son's friend's parents. And then on the environmental side, I want these companies to do the right thing and have the right resources or at least have the knowledge that they're, how to do the right thing.
00:54:06
Speaker
So I started this consulting business to do more and help out around here. Uh, it's not just limited to here. My, my, my main goal is to affect locally, but if somebody needs help, I'm not going to tell them no. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.
00:54:31
Speaker
That's beautiful, Chris, and what a way to give back to the community. Obviously, is this a nonprofit or how are you running this? So it's not a nonprofit, but I do at least know some of the, I know the going rates of some of this. I've been there myself. I have used consulting companies
00:55:01
Speaker
I know how much they charge on some of this stuff. And I also know that some of it, and especially for the smaller companies, I know that it doesn't have to be that much for them.
00:55:16
Speaker
If I can help out and just keep a float, that's all that it really needs to be. This is like a hobby. For me, it's something that I love to do and a goal. It's what I want this community to be.
00:55:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's a beautiful way to give back, Chris. Beautiful way to give back to your community and to help our future generations be able to have a safe place to live and work and play. Yeah.
00:55:54
Speaker
Chris, was there, I'm looking at our notes from the last time we spoke and I have something called Environ Mentor Program. What is that? So Texas has this program with the TCEQ where they take volunteers from the EHS community, mainly environmental professionals, where somebody gets in trouble with
00:56:23
Speaker
something, they're not adhering to some regulation. And the TCEQ needs them to get in line with this regulation and they might not have the money to do it. They're like a mom and pop. A lot of the times it's a mom and pop, like natural gas line.
00:56:50
Speaker
and they take environmental professionals and who are volunteering their time, they connect them with these places that need help.
00:57:02
Speaker
And me, I'm a part of it. So I will go through and help them get into compliance. So whether or not their flare height is too big, or maybe let's say that they didn't know they needed a stormwater plan, and now they're in trouble with stormwater part of it, I go through and help them build that stuff and do it for free as a volunteer basis.
00:57:31
Speaker
Wow. Wow. That's beautiful. What an interesting program. That is wonderful. I like it. Yeah. I love to hear that. Yeah. In, in Vyron. All right. Is that the name of the organization? No, it's just the environment or program. Okay. The, the TCEQ put it together through their small business, uh, helpline. And you know, the people, all the people that you meet who, who work.
00:58:00
Speaker
in that thing too are, you know, people who have such interesting stories themselves. Yeah. So is this something that serves all of Texas? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So if someone wants to Google this, if they're listening and thinking, hey, I live in Texas, I work in Texas, maybe I want to volunteer with this organization. What would be the, what would they search for? They would search for the Environ Mentor Program with the TCEQ.
00:58:29
Speaker
Okay, perfect. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. All one word. Okay, mentor. Yeah. Okay. Chris, you have a full and busy life. And it sounds to me like, since you've opened that box of comic books way back, wanting to be able to do good for your family and your community, it sounds like you are maybe, you know, edging up on that Spiderman level is
00:58:58
Speaker
As we get ready to close for the day, is there anything else you'd like to share with the audience regarding our career or anything else? Our career is special. I had no idea it existed. I had no idea that there was even the letter CSP out there or any of that stuff.
00:59:27
Speaker
going into this not until even maybe five years ago is when i first heard the term csp um and you've and you've achieved that too correct yes but
00:59:42
Speaker
It's really special what we do. And the career itself is special. We get to do everything. Anybody that's involved in this, I mean, we met at that conference and talking with anybody there. I mean, they're all just some of the best people to talk to. Yeah. And Chris is talking about a conference that he and I met at early this fall. Yeah.
01:00:12
Speaker
Yeah, and talking with anybody that works in this position, I mean, they're so interesting and they all seem to be just great people.
01:00:26
Speaker
I really couldn't have asked for a better outcome for what I was going to do starting back in, you know, opening up those comic books, figuring out what I was going to do to being in college and trying to think about what path I was going to go down. It's beautiful. It's beautiful.
01:00:46
Speaker
Well, Chris, I really appreciate your time today and thank you for sharing your story and the really important work that you've been doing throughout your career and how your efforts are impacting the greater good. Thank you so much. Thank you.
01:01:05
Speaker
And thank you all for spending your time listening today. And more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward, as I just said, the common good. Making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day. If you aren't subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can subscribe in iTunes, the Apple Podcast app, or any other podcast player you'd like. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more EHS professionals like Chris and I.
01:01:33
Speaker
Special thanks to Naeem Juraisi, our podcast producer. And until next time, thanks for listening.