Eric Dunker, like many modern professionals, had to make adjustments along the way to respond to industry changes in his 30-plus year environmental engineering career -- beginning right out of college.
“I went to a small high school, Weld Central High School in eastern Colorado and then to Colorado School of Mines to study petroleum engineering,” he said. “I graduated in 1986, and oil went down to 10 bucks a barrel so I couldn’t get a job in what I had studied.”
Showing the versatility that would define his professional path, Dunker called upon his background growing up in a rural community.
“Being from eastern Colorado, my family wasn’t into farming, but I did grow 4H pigs and I was in FFA (Future Farmers of America), so I decided to look to the agricultural industry for opportunities when it was clear that the opportunities in the oil and gas industry were on the downswing at that time,” he said.
“It was part interest and part need. When I couldn’t find something in my original interest area, I looked at what was the growing interest. In the mid-1980s environmental engineering was really growing. It had existed, but not like it does now. I matched my skill set with environmental engineering, which seemed like an area that was never going to go up and down.”
Dunker and a partner formed an engineering consulting and project management company, and from this experience, he says he learned a great deal about dealing with local, state and federal environmental regulations – knowledge that would serve him well at USAEC.
“I learned a lot about dealing with regulators and I also learned that the environmental field, no matter which specific area you are working in has commonalities,” he said. “Build things that don’t make environmental problems, or cleanup ones that already are a problem. That’s a common thread.”
After selling his interest in the agricultural consulting firm, Dunker worked as a consultant and got his first experiences with military clients, and also played a role in developing major environmental sites, including the permitting and civil engineering support for an ethanol plant.
From there, he joined a contractor that was working on environmental water programs at Fort Carson in Colorado, and gained direct experience with dealing with environmental issues at the Army installation while assuring compliance with state, federal and Army environmental regulations.
From this, he also gained insights into how to best create the right processes to succeed in the field.
“You have to keep communicating. Keep the lines of communication open,” he said. “The best way to go is to be transparent both ways, from contractor to government, and back, as well as to the regulators.”
He added that transparency means sharing the inevitable ups and downs.
“Bad news does not get better with age,” he said. “Mistakes will be made, that is just human nature. If you mitigate that by building trust, and showing you are working to do the right things, the right way, that helps as you work through the issues that come up along the way.”
Dunker joined the U.S. Army Environmental Command as an environmental support manager in 2024 and oversees remediation and funding support for Fort Carson as well as the Pueblo Chemical Depot, Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Fort Leonard Wood and Fort Sill.
One of the emerging issues that Dunker sees as a continuing issue in his new role, and across the nation, is dealing with PFAS, or Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances. PFAS refers to a large group of man-made chemicals found in many industrial applications and consumer products such as carpeting, apparel, upholstery, food packaging, fire-fighting foams, and metal plating. In use since the 1940s, PFAS are resistant to heat, oils, stains, grease, and water—properties which contribute to their persistence in the environment. Military installations have used fire-fighting foams in mission critical training, which also has been determined to be a source of contamination.
“PFAS is the next big thing,” he said. “It is in lots of things, GORETEX, upholstery, food packaging – it is everywhere.”
Dunker also said that even with the increased focus on identifying and cleaning up PFAS and related compounds, the issue will take time to resolve.
“The expectation that we can crack this nut really fast – it is a little hard to expect that. This is one of those things that’s not going to happen really fast, it takes time,” he said.
“The goal is to destroy the PFAS and not have to landfill it. That’s a big win. It’s going to take time. If we can get this to work, we’ll be doing cartwheels. We’re cautiously optimistic.”
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