The forklift driver who became a doctoral researcher on the textile waste crisis
Stephen Rutherford has a standard answer when friends ask about his qualifications. His MBA, he tells them, just means bugger all. And the DBA? That’s just doing bugger all.
What “doing bugger all” actually produced is a doctoral dissertation on post-consumer textile waste — the logistics of what happens when 85 to 90 percent of used clothing and textiles currently going into landfill can no longer legally do so. California has moved to legislate Extended Producer Responsibility for textiles; Canada is expected to follow. The infrastructure to handle the volume simply does not yet exist. In British Columbia alone, Steve’s numbers suggest you would need two to three million square feet of warehousing just to process what is currently being buried. His DBA is the beginning of an answer to how that gets built.
Steve started in a warehouse at a trucking company — moving freight, driving a forklift, loading and dispatching trucks. He caught the bug for logistics early and never left. He has spent nearly three decades in the industry, most recently in waste management. After COVID, he felt his career flattening out. He had been thinking about a doctorate since finishing his MBA. “Scratch the itch,” he says.
The week he enrolled in the DBA at Golden Gate University through upGrad, he had his first heart attack. The program offered him a year’s deferral to recover. He declined, using the recovery time to settle into the coursework instead. “It’s not the way to start a program like this,” he admits. “I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody.” What the health scare gave him, though, was perspective. “I had beaten something pretty significant — so I thought, I can beat that. I can beat anything.”
He started the program in his mid-fifties, concerned about his ability to learn. What changed was patience. “I take the time now. I understand that learning something is going to take me longer. The patience is there now. And now I know how to learn again.” His professor has since told him there are probably six more research projects embedded in what he originally proposed. He is interested in pursuing them.
The DBA also changed how he reads his own workplace. Where he had previously taken what he observed at face value, he found he could now attach it to theory. External factors, systematic factors — context he had not had the framework to name before. “It gave me a different perspective in analyzing situations.”
When they put the doctoral hood on him in San Francisco, he had one thought. “Wow, this is real.”
Dr. Steve Rutherford completed the Doctor of Business Administration through Golden Gate University’s online DBA program — a fully accredited, fully online doctorate for working professionals. Applications are open.
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