Kyle Carbajal, Environmental Services Analyst II, Central Marin Sanitation Agency
Kyle Carbajal is enthusiastic about learning.
As an Environmental Services Analyst II at the Central Marin Sanitation Agency in San Rafael, he gets plenty of opportunities to fulfill that wish.
He’s a member of the agency’s pre-treatment program, an assignment that puts him in contact with a wide range of industrial and commercial accounts. “I’m responsible for industrial, dental and FOG inspections, as well as permitting, enforcement, compliance, monitoring and sampling,” he says. “I enjoy meeting new people, visiting different sites, and becoming familiar with different situations. In our service area we have over 500 restaurants, as well as metal finishing, silver recovery and bio-medical operations.”
Carbajal enjoys even more diversity in the other part of his job—process control testing in the plant’s laboratory. He performs analyses for coliform, volatile acids, BOD and COD and more.
His zest for learning goes back to an internship he held at NASA Ames Research Center while a student at UC-Berkeley, where he majored in environmental sciences. During his internship he monitored drinking water and wastewater quality. That led to a connection with the City of Palo Alto where he was hired to work in industrial pretreatment.
He worked for the City of Palo Alto for about four years before joining Central Marin Sanitation Agency in 2019.
The job is never boring. “I find wastewater more interesting than drinking water, because it has a variety of different things in it depending on the source,” he says.
It never gets monotonous, Carbajal says, and he’s constantly challenged by trying to keep up with the pace of activity and never “dropping the ball or getting behind.”
His goal is to stay with the clean water profession and eventually move up to a management position where he could share his appreciation for learning and wastewater management with his staff.
He would also share that enthusiasm with students contemplating a job in the environmental profession.
“I’d tell them the job doesn’t have to be glamorous to be exciting and rewarding,” he says.
Carbajal currently holds Environmental Compliance Inspector Grade III and Laboratory Analyst Grade I certifications from CWEA, and a Grade D2 Water Distribution Operator certification from the California State Water Resources Control Board.
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