Ron Macdonald, P.Eng, MASc – Senior Environmental Engineer

Ron Macdonald is a professional engineer with a Master's degree in environmental engineering. He started in the petroleum sector in Alberta, then worked in water and wastewater management in BC, and has melded the two in his current practice areas of municipal energy planning, urban resource conservation, and life cycle assessment (LCA).

Ron has conducted several energy and GHG plans for local governments - both at the corporate level and at the community scale. These have helped his clients define a pragmatic and sequential path towards becoming more energy efficient and reaching their GHG reduction and climate neutral commitments.  These plans are developed in concert with municipal staff, stakeholder groups, and the public.  Recent plans have proposed implementing the latest Provincial legislation including the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act and the Sustainable Communties Act (Bill27).  Ron has recently been assisting the BC Ministry of the Environment with the development of their Community Emissions Inventory system.

Ron has specialized expertise in conducting life cycle assessment (LCA) projects.  LCA allows for the inclusion of all upstream and downstream production stages involved in a process to be evaluated - beyond just the energy or emissions at one facility.  He has used this framework to evaluate infrastructure decisions such as waste management, organics recycling, and electricity generation.  The approach is especially powerful when applied to systems that include energy recovery as it quantifies the avoided or ‘offset' emissions achieved by the energy capture (e.g. avoided fossil fuel use etc.).  Other factors evaluated in these studies include air contaminants, greenhouse gases (GHGs) and energy and electricity inputs and recovery.