Madhavi Venkatesan is a faculty member in the Department of Economics, Northeastern University. She has published three economics textbooks under the series A Framework for Sustainable Practices. In 2019, her fourth text SDG8 – Sustainable Economic Growth and Decent Work for All was published by Emerald. She is presently under contract with Routledge to write SDG12: Responsible Consumption and Production and her text, Economics of Sustainability is scheduled to be published by Springer in mid 2021.
In 2016, Madhavi established Sustainable Practices, a 501(c)3 nonprofit with a mission “to facilitate a culture of sustainability as defined by reducing the human-made impact to the planet and its ecosystems.” The organization operates in the 15 towns that comprise Barnstable County, Massachusetts and Madhavi serves as its executive director. In 2019, Sustainable Practices initiated the Municipal Plastic Bottle Ban campaign, which sought to eliminate town purchase of single-use plastic bottled beverages and the sale of beverages in single-use plastic containers on town property. As of fall 2020, the Municipal Plastic Bottle Ban has been adopted by 13 towns and the Commercial Single-use Plastic Water Bottle Ban, the organization’s 2020 initiative which makes the sale of single-use plastic water bottles illegal, has been adopted in seven. More information on Sustainable Practices is available on its website, https://sustainablepracticesltd.org/.