UofL's Brent Fryrear wins 2025 Pollution Prevention Educator Award
Brent Fryrear, director of the Partnership for a Green City, chair of UofL’s Sustainability Council, and affiliated faculty in Urban and Public Affairs, has been named the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable’s 2025 MVP2 Educator. Nominated by Lissa McCracken, executive director of KPPC, Fryrear was honored for his leadership in sustainability education and pollution prevention. UofL and KPPC have earned multiple MVP2 Awards, and Fryrear’s recognition highlights his dedication to advancing environmental stewardship and education.
P2 Educator Award: Brent Fryrear
In his decades in environmental protection, Brent Fryrear of the University of Louisville has spent the vast bulk of his time setting pollution prevention vision and strategies, creating and advancing inspiring work in P2 in a variety of contexts, implementing multiple P2 projects, and achieving significant impacts. After working for the EPA Region 4 Technical Assistance Team when the Pollution Prevention Act of 1990 first came out, Brent went to work at Courtaulds Coatings, Inc., (Porter Paints) as the Environmental Manager, and was tasked with “waste minimization” and energy efficiency in a number of architectural and industrial coatings facilities. He incorporated source reduction in all of his training sessions with the employees on the floor and gathered their ideas on ways to improve the manufacturing process. This led to a Shared Savings program where employees could make suggestions and receive a share of the savings that their suggestion created.
Upon working for Jefferson County Government as the County’s Environmental Planner, Brent worked with the Solid Waste Management District to create “Green Inc., your waste reduction link”, a program to work with small to medium sized businesses on source reduction, reuse, and recycling. He educated/trained people at each one of the companies that the County SWM District worked with and also business associations around the county to spread the word on saving the environment and saving money. Next, Brent was tapped to be the Hazardous Waste Manager at the University of Louisville, where he worked with research and teaching lab professors on P2, reducing toxicity of wastes, buying only what you need so you don’t have to dispose of the rest. He then worked at the KY Pollution Prevention Center to manage a pilot project called KEEPS, the KY Energy Efficiency Program in Schools. The program worked so well, it was expanded and the state used the program as the basis to save school districts' money.
Now Brent is the Director of the Partnership for a Green City (PGC), a sustainability collaboration of UofL, Louisville Metro Government, Jefferson County Public Schools and Jefferson Community & Technical College. The PGC has teams that work on energy efficiency, total materials management, sustainable behavior, workshops/seminars/youth summits, green infrastructure, green purchasing and more. More recently, Brent has also been teaching Behavioral Dimensions of Sustainability, Intro to Sustainability, Environmental Management, and Policy & Governance in Sustainability. In each class during appropriate sessions, he presents on P2, and how students can take what they learn and use that knowledge in their future endeavors.
