Max Kelln ’04 is helping companies be proactive

Helping businesses work toward better environmental practices is a priority for Max Kelln ’04. He is an associate regulatory compliance environmental attorney at Faegre Baker Daniels in Indianapolis.

“I’m working with companies on compliance with new and existing environmental regulations in an attempt to avoid enforcement and litigation issues down the road,” Kelln says. “With the intersection between energy use and the economy on the one hand, and our environment and sustainability on the other, you really do see the confluence of those two issues day-to-day.”

He said many of the current environmental statutes, such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, were passed in the early 1970s and are not adapted to fit a lot of companies today. New environmental legislation will be required to deal with that, Kelln says.

He works proactively with many Fortune 500 companies, industry leaders in terms of implementing new and clean technology, he says. “There is no threat of them being out-of-compliance in the short term, but the new legislation will happen eventually. If they start putting in these controls now, it will cost less in the long run.”

Kelln says the air emissions and the waste we generate today will have an impact on our environment in the long-term. “The longer we wait, the greater and more irreversible these issues will become,” he says. “Eventually, we’ll get to a tipping point where we might not be able to undo the adverse effects we’ve made to our environment.”

Posted June 1, 2014 in Alumni.

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