Bree Dietly is a public policy consultant in Somerville, Massachusetts, focusing on materials management programs and product stewardship. She is a leading expert on container deposit systems, extended producer responsibility, recycling data, and packaging regulation. Throughout her career she has focused on the intersection of environmental and business/economic issues, beginning with work for EPA and state environmental agencies and now primarily for the beverage industry.
In addition to research and analysis, Bree engages in advocacy work representing clients before legislative and regulatory bodies, provides strategic counsel for firms and trade associations, and assists businesses with legislative and regulatory compliance.
Bree recently founded Breezeway Consulting LLC, after leaving Northbridge Environmental, a firm she helped found in 1993.
Curriculum Vitae of Bree S. Dietly
Breezeway Consulting LLC
81 Yorktown Street
Somerville, MA 02144.
508-932-8255 (m)
bree@breezewayc.com
Bree Dietly founded Breezeway in 2022 opening the next chapter in her 37-year consulting career. Breezeway allows Bree to focus her time on her consulting clients and the complex public policy environment in which they find themselves. Bree’s functional expertise lies in analysis of economic, cost, and environmental impacts of legislation and regulatory programs. She provides strategic counsel to clients on these issues and represents clients before legislative bodies, regulatory agencies, public forums, as an expert witness, and with the media. She has appeared before legislative committees in more than 30 states, in Washington, DC, and in several foreign and territorial capitals. Bree also assists companies with legal and regulatory compliance related to packaging and environmental fee and tax issues.
Today, Bree Dietly’s consulting focuses on materials management, circularity, and product stewardship. She is a respected subject matter expert on beverage container deposit systems, extended producer responsibility, and packaging regulation. Her work in these areas, primarily for the beverage and food industries, consumes the majority of her consulting time. She continues to work on tax and other regulatory issues affecting businesses and on compliance with environmental programs in the area of packaging.
Previously, Bree was a founding partner of Northbridge Environmental; she served as a Principal of the firm and as its managing partner for more than 28 years before going off on her own to establish Breezeway. Northbridge is a financial, economic, and management consulting firm serving clients in the federal government, numerous state agencies, state and national trade associations, and corporations.
Blending Analysis and Advocacy – Beverage and Consumer Product Industries
Since 1986, Bree Dietly has analyzed costs, economic impacts, and benefits of policies affecting a wide range of beverage, food, and consumer product companies and retailers. Working for national and state trade associations as well as individual corporations, she assesses how legislative and regulatory changes affect industry costs and decisions, and how industry can reshape or reform these programs to be more effective and less burdensome. She has analyzed issues ranging from recycling and materials management to tax policy, labeling requirements, right-to-know legislation, and water policy.
Today Bree is on the cutting edge of emerging legislation on producer responsibility for packaging in the US. She is engaged in policy forums, drafting and commenting on legislation, providing expert testimony, and strategic discussions for how to implement these programs in the US market.
Bree is an established authority on another type of producer responsibility program: deposit return systems for beverage containers (widely known as “bottle bills” in the US). She has completed primary research on deposit programs in each of the eleven US states and one city that enacted deposit laws and evaluated dozens of proposed new laws and amendments throughout the country. She has also provided testimony to state legislatures, the US Senate, regulatory bodies, and as an expert witness in litigation related to the issue. Bree has spoken on the issue before numerous conferences and meetings, and has consulted on the issue in other countries and US territories.
Today Bree is developing model legislation for producer-managed deposit systems – common in the rest of the world, but only found in one state in the US. She is involved with analysis of program options, legislative drafting, advocacy, and strategy for her clients.
Bree also assists beverage companies and brand owners with compliance, strategy, and litigation surrounding deposit issues. She has prepared strategic assessments of legislative options, developed and evaluated corporate compliance programs, and developed recommendations on program design and compliance. She recently participated in a seminar with a European packaging company on issues and priorities in designing new deposit schemes in the EU and UK.
She has also submitted declarations as an expert on behalf of beverage industry clients in litigation. Bree serves as the financial manager of two beverage industry cooperatives that manage redemption of empty containers under the Maine and Vermont container deposit laws. She was selected by the local bottlers in each state to compile confidential sales data from the bottlers as well as data on containers redeemed by bottlers and third party vendors. She is responsible for auditing all data and for equitably allocating bottlers’ financial interests and expenses in the program.
Bree has gained experience with the operations and economics of CPG companies through examination of various policies affecting product packaging and labeling at the state level. She has studied costs, economic impact, and benefits of food labeling requirements in California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington as well as various environmental initiatives in California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Each study involved original research on affected entities, regulatory impact and response, unit cost estimates for technical and administrative requirements, the impact of the costs on governments and industries affected, and environmental benefits.
She has conducted and overseen research into the impact of beverage taxes dating back to the 1990s. She has examined the incidence of these taxes, looking at revenue generation, impact on prices and sales, distributional impacts, and, beginning in the late 2000s, microeconomic number of states including California, Maine, New York, Rhode island, Vermont, Washington, DC, and Washington State and cities from Berkeley to Philadelphia.
Because they are rooted firmly in quantitative research, her studies have stood the test of high-profile scrutiny in legislative hearings, as an expert, as part of initiative and referendum campaigns, and other politically-charged engagements. She makes frequent appearances on behalf of his clients before state legislative committees, editorial boards, and community forums.
EPA and Waste Industry Financial and Regulatory Analysis
Bree Dietly managed a series of economic impact analyses of federal regulatory programs earlier in her career, assessing the national impacts of effort affecting a wide range of waste products and materials. She has characterized and analyzed industries that generate and manage used oils, municipal solid waste landfills and incinerators, glass and aluminum recyclers, generators of solvent contaminated wipers and shop towels, hazardous waste transporters, and hazardous waste disposal facilities.
Bree managed the preparation of a comprehensive benefits analysis for the imposition of new federal regulations affecting stormwater control, overseeing the development of the study’s methodology, data collection, and analysis.
Bree later oversaw materials development and then taught a three-and-a-half-day course on environmental policy analysis in three Central European countries. The course, prepared for EPA’s Office of International Activities, was built around a case study of industrial facilities and their environmental and economic impact on the surrounding area. Bree compiled data on actual industrial emissions in the study areas and wrote an extensive case study based on the data. She developed student and teaching materials on the case as well as several lectures on concepts to be applied in the case. She also trained teachers in the host countries and coordinated several different offerings of the course in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Slovakia.
Bree also performed regulatory and economic analysis of a number of hazardous waste issues for EPA. She was involved in the development of EPA models to analyze the human health risk and economic cost of various land disposal regulations for hazardous waste management facilities. She conducted a comprehensive analysis of regulatory costs associated with compliance with the 1984 and 1992 RCRA reauthorizations and subsequently performed assessments of the economic and environmental impact of allowing variances from land disposal restrictions.
Bree has also directed many consulting assignments to evaluate recycling businesses with regard to their viability, cost control and efficiency, and their effectiveness in furthering legislative and regulatory recycling goals. She independently evaluated the operation of these firms through site visits, financial reviews, and cross-company comparisons. She has provided testimony and expert witness support in hearings and legal proceedings regarding the operating costs and efficiency of these companies. She has also provided financial review of and recommendations for recycling operations. She managed the analysis and evaluation of pilot plastics recycling programs in New Jersey and Washington State. Bree oversaw field data collection on operating costs and efficiency, analyzed company costs and overhead allocation, and recommended steps to improve program efficiency to lower costs.
Other Professional Experience
Prior to establishing Breezeway in late 2021, Bree joined two partners is forming and operating Northbridge Environmental Management Consultants. In addition to her consulting practice, Bree served as the managing partner and CFO for Northbridge since its founding in 1993. She was responsible for managing all aspects of the operations, finances, human resources, benefit planning, and contracts management for the firm. Northbridge has 19 employees spread across eight states and is headquartered in Westford, Massachusetts.
Bree joined Northbridge’s predecessor firm, Temple, Barker & Sloane, in 1986 where she helped establish the firm’s Washington, DC office. Previously, she was an economic analyst at Sobotka & Company in Washington, DC.
Education
Bree Dietly received a BA in political economy (magna cum laude) from Williams College in 1982 where she concentrated in environmental studies. She continued directly to graduate work, earning a master of public policy degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1984 with a concentration in energy and environmental policy.