Liz Moore, project engineer in Tetra Tech’s solid waste practice and our employee Sustainability Community lead, shares how a fourth-grade science fair competition sparked her passion for sustainability, leading her to a career in civil engineering.
Liz has always been passionate about the environment, stemming back to her childhood days working on her family’s farm in Northern California. Her knack for science helped her place first in every science fair in elementary school.
Sustainability has been a part of Liz’s everyday life from a young age. She knew she wanted to do something to better the earth, and civil engineering offered her the best of both worlds. At Tetra Tech, she has been Leading with Science® by working on projects that create a better environment for future generations.
I’ve always been passionate about the environment, and I think it all stems back to growing up on my family’s working ranch in Northern California.
Liz loves that part of her job is designing systems to capture landfill gas, such as methane. Tetra Tech’s designs capture and prevent methane from being released into the atmosphere. Instead, it gets converted into electricity that can be used to power buildings on-site, with any excess being sent to the grid to be used elsewhere.
Her experience led her to be part of the winning team of Tetra Tech’s Tech 1000 Challenge, which leverages our Tetra Tech Delta technologies to find innovative solutions for our clients’ toughest challenges. Her team Implemented FusionMap®, Tetra Tech’s proprietary Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to better identify fugitive leachate and methane gas in landfills.
A UAV can fly over a site at about 25 acres per hour, covering areas that are unsafe for a human to walk and eliminating any gaps in coverage. A camera was mounted on the UAV to capture hundreds of chemical signatures, but the real magic was using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and process them. Through AI, the team was able to analyze terabytes of data and quickly visualize where the methane was leaking on the landfill. Tetra Tech’s technology increased the speed and accuracy of data processing, saving the client time and money.