Five Minutes with Kris Knight
Five Minutes with Kris Knight
With a career rooted in environmental compliance and an unwavering passion for improving the environment, Kris Knight – Environmental Team Leader, can be described as a real-life Captain Planet. As an advocate for embracing diversity, be it projects or people, every day is both challenging and rewarding for him. Championing a candid and positive attitude, he believes that success in this industry extends beyond academic qualifications. We spent 5 minutes with Kris to find out more.
What drew you to Environmental Engineering as a career?
I was drawn to the industry as I wanted to make a difference and leave my stamp for a better environment in the future, real “Captain Planet” like.
What’s the most rewarding part of your role?
Variety. Each site and project is different. Each client is different as well. It’s great to meet a wide range of people in the industry from contractors to business decision makers to extremely big-brained engineers and scientists.
What career advice do you have for those starting out in this industry?
Say yes to every opportunity, be open-minded and have the right attitude. You could have a Harvard degree, but a bad attitude won’t get you a job with me.
Coffee or Tea?
7 years ago me would say tea, current small child family me – 100% Coffee. It owns me now and I have accepted coffee as an essential part of life. I still enjoy a good tea (no milk!!), I also love an iced tea on a hot day.
If you could give your past-self one piece of advice, what would it be?
Try harder, its ok to be a chilled-out kiwi, but not everybody in business appreciates that and sometimes it’ll give the wrong impression. Although I’m not sure younger me would’ve listened to that counsel.
Do you have a personal mantra or a quote that inspires you?
No mantra, but I have a few quotes, I appreciate.
- Do, or do not, there is no try – Yoda
- Imagination is more important than knowledge – Albert Einstein
- You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take – Wayne Gretzky
I think they are all equally important to various aspects of life and work. Currently, that last quote particularly resonates with me as I’m focused on expanding the FMG Environmental team in Victoria and interacting with clients.
Is there a standout project from your time with FMG? What makes it special?
Closing out a legacy audit from before I joined FMG. The site was relatively complex with 2 adjacent landfills, historically leaking underground fuel tanks, several layers of remediation (successful and less successful), several site derived contaminants and a polluted groundwater plume migrating offsite. The project was special because I had zero involvement in the previous patchwork of events but was able to pull it all together and achieve audit and CUTEP (clean up to the extent practicable), much to the delight of our client after 6 years of assessment and the client changing direction (with the site) more than once.
What do you like about working with FMG?
The possibilities, the people and the collective technical knowledge across our breadth of services. It makes for some great collective learnings and support to our clients from pre-purchase right through to site completion.
