BIER Stakeholder Spotlight: Travis Loop

Name: Travis Loop, Founder, and Producer of waterloop, a nonprofit media outlet featuring conversations about water solutions

Company: waterloop

Connect with Travis on LinkedIn

Welcome to our series aimed at spotlighting the individual leaders within BIER member companies and stakeholder organizations. Learn how these practitioners and their companies are addressing pressing challenges around water, energy, agriculture, climate change, and what inspires each of them to advance environmental sustainability in the beverage sector and collectively, overall.

Briefly describe your role and responsibilities and how long you have worked with your organization.

I'm the founder, producer, and host of the platform waterloop, a nonprofit media outlet that officially launched about a year ago. It presents podcasts, videos, and social media on a wide range of water issues, and specifically with a laser focus on solutions. It’s common to hear so much about the doom and gloom and problems and challenges around water, and it's definitely important to be aware of them. However, I think it's important to focus on the solutions that are available and the progress that's being made with a sincere effort to share so others can model the approaches.

The waterloop podcast covers a real wide range of issues including the health of waterways, how communities have benefited from water projects, addressing environmental justice and water equity, building climate resilience, and responding to water scarcity and shortages. Sometimes the episodes are guests from just one organization and they're talking about things that they have done, or sometimes there are multiple guests from different organizations talking about collaboration.  There are also several examples of collaborative work that involve non-government organizations (NGOs), the private sector, and government all collaborating and working together on shared water challenges.

How has the organization’s sustainability initiatives evolved over the years and what are your priorities for 2021?

Although the drought and the situation in the West have been long-running, it is increasingly getting worse.  As a result, I've put more emphasis on water in the West and what's happening in the Colorado River Basin, including in California.

I have also increased the emphasis on environmental justice and water equity issues on the podcast to reflect the explosion and interest in inequality in the country over the past year. With everything that's happened, there has been a real rise in interest in those types of issues and that content has been popular with the waterloop audience. Water equity involves how communities of color or low-income communities often have lower-quality drinking water and more polluted waterways.

Another area where I've shifted the podcast is in water data and information management. The advancement of technology provides us all with so many more capabilities; specifically, to improve water management and advance innovation.

Learn more about Travis Loop in this BIER Stakeholder Spotlight.