The Minneapolis company of Poldi Gerard-Ngo ’75 is helping Vietnam go green.

When Poldi Gerard-Ngo ’75 graduated from Macalester with a sociology degree, she assumed— reasonably enough—that she’d apply her education to a career in social work. Instead, her company is now completing Vietnam’s first-ever project to make good use of rubbish.

The $52 million waste-to-compost plant outside of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) will eventually employ 600 workers and process 1,200 tons of garbage daily. The end product—rich, organic fertilizer—will be marketed to farm-service companies. And an on-site facility will process plastic garbage bags into condensed pellets to supply Vietnamese plastic manufacturers who would otherwise import raw materials. Scheduled to begin operating last month, the facility will be replicated in several other cities in Vietnam and serve as a model throughout Southeast Asia.

Composting offers the perfect waste-management solution in climates with tropical heat and monsoon seasons, Gerard-Ngo explains. It’s a major green step forward in Vietnam, a country where poor waste-management practices and inadequately lined landfills have led to serious water pollution. “Everything we do has a green tint,” says Gerard-Ngo of her Minneapolis-based company, Lemna International, Inc. Gerard-Ngo runs the operation with her husband, Viet Ngo, a University of Minnesota– trained engineer who arrived in the United States from Vietnam at age 18.

“We met at a disco dance class in 1979, but ignored each other for three weeks,” Gerard-Ngo recalls. “I said no to marriage at first, but he persisted, and the third time he asked I gave in.” Viet Ngo began his search for an all-natural wastewater treatment process in a garage in Brooklyn Park. Gerard-Ngo was involved with her husband’s work from the beginning, first by doing the bookkeeping.

She stepped away from the business to raise the couple’s three sons (now 27, 22, and 18), but 13 years ago turned her attention back, and is now vice president of marketing. This “involves a lot of feasibility studies, business plans, and financial arrangements with private and government entities,” says Gerard-Ngo. “I’m always learning something new.”

Since 1983, when Viet Ngo founded the company, Lemna has earned recognition for its pond-based municipal and industrial treatment facilities that use duckweed—a fast-growing, pollutant-absorbing plant—as part of a natural and inexpensive wastewater treatment process.

One such facility in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, attracts artists, tourists, environmentalists, and engineers to its 50 acres of wetlands and winding green channels. The company has completed more than 300 infrastructure projects in 16 countries, and is currently engaged in some 25 countries as developer, implementer, and financier of projects worth several billion dollars. The international and cross-cultural aspects of her work are among the things she loves best, says Gerard-Ngo. The seeds of global interest were planted early. When she was 5 years old, her family moved to the Netherlands, when her father, Lyle Gerard ’49, received a Fulbright scholarship to teach there. Says Gerard-Ngo, “It was a formative experience.”

Gerard-Ngo’s exposure to the wider world continued after her family’s return to the Twin Cities, where her father and mother, Joan Woolsey Gerard ’48, remained involved with Macalester’s international studies programs, as well as with the Minnesota International Center. “We always had international visitors in our home,” recalls Gerard-Ngo. “Probably hundreds over the years.” Spending her senior year of high school as an exchange student in Rome only deepened her love for international exploration. That year Gerard-Ngo applied to colleges she chose specifically for their strong international programs. “At Macalester,” she says, “I found a continuation of the international openness of my family.”

She also found former political science professor Chuck Green. “He was outstanding,” Gerard-Ngo recalls fondly. “He taught a class based on Machiavelli’s The Prince. Chuck Green taught me critical thinking, and how to look beyond their words to understand people’s motivations. You have to understand where people are coming from, their needs, their cultural context and subtext. Learning this was, for me, like a light bulb going on.”

More than 30 years later, Gerard- Ngo finds her old sociology background still surfacing regularly, intensifying her curiosity and lending focus to her observations. “For instance, there’s great reverence for education and for teachers in Vietnam. Even after leaving school, people keep studying to improve themselves. Yet my Vietnamese employees sometimes resist digging in, rolling up their sleeves as an American might. They tend to instead seek the expert, someone they think will have just the right answer.”

Differences such as these intrigue Gerard-Ngo, and further convince her of the importance of experiencing cultures different from one’s own. “The opportunities I’ve had to experience other cultures have made me believe in the yin and yang of life, the good and not-so-good of every culture. It’s not a matter of ranking different cultures but of understanding their differences— and the implications of those differences.”

That same passion for observation and reflection underlies Lemna’s commitment to implement creative new solutions to environmental challenges. The company’s self-described mission is “to transform waste into useful compounds to reforest environmentally ravaged areas, create green belts and parkways for cities, promote eco-tourism, and protect and nurture endangered fauna and flora.” Their waste-to-compost facility outside of Ho Chi Minh City seems to manifest that mission beautifully. “This project is close to both our hearts,” Gerard-Ngo says. “This is our first venture into Vietnam, and a return for my husband. It’s such a win–win situation.”

Jeannie Ouellette is a Minneapolis freelance writer.