Driving Environmental Change

The only time Celine King ’23 ever thought about trucks before arriving at Fairfield as a first-year in 2019 was when she was driving behind one on the highway.

“Now, when I encounter a truck on the road, I envision a sticker on their bumper that reads ‘Emissions Tracked by GreenIRR,’” she said.

GreenIRR, Inc. is the company King founded in her senior year at Fairfield after having competed in the Charles F. Dolan School of Business’s StartUp Showcase and taking home the People’s Choice Award the spring before. The daunting mission she has set for herself is nothing less than mitigating the environmental impact of an industry with one of the largest carbon footprints on the planet — trucking.

“I always knew I wanted to do something that would have an impact on climate change,” said King, who returned to campus this past April to sit on the Investor Panel for the 2025 StartUp Showcase.

“Transportation generates 90 percent of the emissions in the U.S. And, of that 90 percent, trucks generate 72 percent. My inspiration was to find a way to help trucking companies gain some control over their emissions.”

Easier said than done, of course. Indeed, the biggest challenge she and her nineperson team faced wasn’t creating, testing, and piloting the software. Nor was it building the website or finding investors or office space (they currently gather at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Labs). It was, she said, “bringing brand-new technology into a legacy industry.”

In short, the trucking industry is old school. Prior to GreenIRR, almost all required emissions reports were done on spreadsheets, the figures often entered by hand — a 30- to 40-hour process fraught with error possibilities. King’s idea for GreenIRR was to create an SaaS (software as a service) carbon accounting platform for trucking carriers to automatically measure fleet emissions and generate regulationcompliant reports.

Richard E. Hyman, an adjunct professor in the Center For Applied Ethics, sees King’s idea as “meeting the problem head on. There are tens of thousands of trucking companies in the U.S. It’s a tough crowd, a competitive industry and economically challenging. Company owners may not think about the environment, but they do care about efficiency and saving money, and GreenIRR can help with both. It has a user-friendly interface and can produce reports in seconds.”

A Pennsylvania native, King came to Fairfield as a biology major on a preveterinarian track— she graduated with a double-major in business analytics and biology. Two classes in her sophomore year turned her head, and life, around. The first was a course on climate change taught by David L. Downie, PhD, and the second was Hyman’s “Environmental Ethics” course.

Taking these classes via Zoom in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, King had a “visceral reaction” to the coursework.

“Richard’s class was the pivot point for me, but I don’t know if I’d have made that pivot without having taken David Downie’s class first,” she said. “I just knew, at the end of that sophomore year, I wanted a career in climate, however that might take form.”

At the time, Hyman was also a mentor in the Dolan School’s Business Entrepreneurship Program. At the end of the semester, he encouraged students to think about bringing a StartUp business idea to present in the fall. “It was voluntary and not for credit,” said Hyman. “Celine came prepared with an idea and we worked together for nine months on it, at the end of which she asked me to be a partner.”

King credits the emphasis on experiential learning at the Dolan School. “Chris Huntley [an analytics professor and Fairfield StartUp director] said I needed a hard skill, something to ground me in real life experience and help me with starting a business,” she said. “Through the school, I interned for two summers — first with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at UCONN’s Coastal Biogeochemical Dynamics lab and the following summer with Greenbacker Capital, which invests in solar and wind energy projects. Experience is the best way to learn.”

Other people cited by King as instrumental to her success are Peter Murrugarra, a StartUp advisor/mentor, and Matthew Miller, a scientist, innovator, and high-tech entrepreneur who mentored Team GreenIRR during the 2022 StartUp Showcase.

“Matt Miller is at the top of my list,” she said. “He treated this then-19-year-old like an adult, which was empowering because he’s so accomplished. He taught me to believe in myself.”

Related Stories