By Catharine Skipp, University of Miami News
Growing up, Kaitlyn Jauregui and her friends loved kayaking on the Oleta River in North Miami Beach near her home. They were appalled by the trash washed up on the shores and bobbing on the river that connects the Everglades with Biscayne Bay. They started bringing bags on their trips to collect water bottles, plastic caps and bags, and other detritus and properly dispose of them.
Fast forward a decade, and Jauregui is in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, this past December attending the United Nations climate summit — the 28th annual Conference of the Parties, known as COP28, with professor Jessica Owley, director of the Environmental Law Program, and her peers from the University of Miami School of Law.
There, the 24-year-old presented her research on single-use plastics in the food and beverage industry and worked with the Ecuadorian delegation, focusing on a long-range goal of forming a treaty to end the practice. Jauregui recently prepared a brief for the Ecuadorian government.
From rivers to beaches to an educational concentration
By the time Jauregui attended the Alonzo and Tracy Mourning Senior High Biscayne Bay Campus in North Miami, her interests had grown, and she enrolled in AP environmental science.
“The course made me very interested in environmental studies, and I considered pursuing environmental law for a while,” she said.
Jauregui was also a part of her high school’s law academy, which replaced all participating students’ electives with legal-based studies. “I loved the in-class debates and legal theory projects, so from then I knew I would study law,” she said. Jauregui gained practical experience through the program by volunteering at the North Dade Justice Center for Justice Jason Dimitris.
However, she had been surrounded by a business mindset her entire life, being around her family’s successful luxury bus company, and had always known business would figure somehow into her future career.
After that, she found a great way to combine her business, law, and environmental studies interests. At Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, Jauregui earned a B.B.A. in marketing and sustainability from the Goizueta Business School, leading her to her first U.N. COP attendance in 2019. She studied “how we in business and law can incorporate greener practices,” an interest that continued into law school.
Distilling her many interests, at the School of Law she is an editor of the Business Law Review and has garnered Legal Academy Fellow Honors: CALI Award in Corporate Compliance and Risk Management, Dean’s Award in Administrative Law, Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute Fellowship, and Cuban American Bar Association Scholarship.
Following her graduation in May and admission to The Florida Bar, Jauregui will be junior legal counsel in the general counsel’s office of Celsius Holdings Inc., the global energy drink company, where she will enhance company policies regarding international trade, sustainability goals, and intellectual property.
Jauregui hopes to inspire lawyers and businesspersons to be mindful of their influence on stakeholder decision-making about consumption and waste. “I would like to promote the idea of a circular economy in my role at Celsius,” she said.
This piece was originally published at https://news.miami.edu/stories/2024/04/school-of-law-student-researches-single-use-plastics.html.
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