When Josh Buchsbaum walks through the halls of Marblehead High School this week, he won’t just be revisiting his old locker and classrooms.
He’ll be looking at the building through a completely different lens — one shaped by 25,000 miles of solo cycling across five continents and a career devoted to energy efficiency.
Buchsbaum, who graduated from MHS in 2008, now lives in Golden, Colorado. He’s back in town this week to conduct comprehensive energy audits at Marblehead High, Veterans and Village schools. The assessments are part of the town’s broader push to evaluate building performance, identify energy savings and explore electrification and decarbonization opportunities.
The Select Board is expected to vote on a proposed energy reduction plan this week, according to Sustainability Coordinator Logan Casey. The school assessments are funded completely by MassSave.
From product design to pedals
After MHS, Buchsbaum headed to upstate New York to attend Rochester Institute of Technology, earning a degree in mechanical engineering technology.
“I originally wanted to do product design … working with plastics,” he said.
After college, he moved to Colorado to work as a mountain bike guide, eventually taking a job as a product engineer to pay off his student loans. But even then, travel was tugging at him.
“I wanted to see the world and shake it out of my system, but balancing world travel and a career is hard,” he said. “That was the right time to break out of my routine, see as much of the world and broaden my horizons as much as I could. Riding a bike is a great way to experience culture, connect with people and landscapes and get a true sense of traveling and even living as a local without it being centered around tourism.”
So in 2017, he set off alone on what became a three-year, round-the-world bicycle journey.
25,000 miles, five continents
The first year, Buchsbaum rode from California to Argentina, pedaling through Mexico, Central America and South America — including Paraguay and Brazil — before flying from Buenos Aires to South Africa.
From there, he rode nine months across Africa, touching 14 or 15 countries. He traveled from Cape Town to Cairo, passing through Botswana, Namibia and Tanzania along the way.
He continued on to Europe — Turkey, the Balkans and much of Eastern Europe up to Finland — rode through Russia, then down through Central Asia, India and Nepal before returning home on New Year’s 2020.
In total, he logged roughly 25,000 miles on a touring bike, riding highways and remote sandy stretches alike — entirely solo.
The journey changed him.
“Not to sound like some enlightened hippie, but riding my bike all those miles and seeing all the plastic and waste around the world changed my mind about what I wanted to do,” he said.
A pivot toward efficiency
Before his trip, Buchsbaum had worked in construction with a focus on HVAC systems. That foundation proved crucial.
“I wanted to take the foundation of engineering and HVAC that I was familiar with and put it toward something that wasn’t wasteful,” he said.
Today, Buchsbaum is a certified energy manager and senior energy efficiency engineer with Michaels Energy, where he has worked for three years and has been in the industry for about five and a half. His role includes conducting energy audits and retro-commissioning studies of commercial and industrial buildings, analyzing data, assisting clients with implementation and rebate applications, and helping organizations move toward more efficient futures.
“Energy conservation is arguably the single greatest and cleanest energy resource we have,” Buchsbaum said. “The choice to focus in this field is an easy one for me. It allows me to utilize a technical skillset to benefit society in a positive, non-controversial way. I’m passionate about serving our clients and customers to enable them with the ability and knowledge to work towards an efficient future.”
Coming home
In Marblehead, he’ll be working with the sustainability coordinator on what Casey has described as a comprehensive building assessment — essentially an energy efficiency audit and report designed to identify savings and evaluate pathways toward electrification and decarbonization.
For Buchsbaum, whose parents now live in Swampscott and who returns to the North Shore once or twice a year, the project carries added meaning.
The classrooms may look the same. The hallways may feel familiar. But this time, he’ll be scanning for air handling units, control systems, insulation performance and lighting loads — searching for ways to make the buildings that shaped him less wasteful and more sustainable.
After circling the globe and witnessing the scale of global consumption firsthand, Buchsbaum’s mission has come full circle: applying hard-earned technical skills to the place where his journey began.
And when the audits are complete, he’ll head back to Colorado — where, outside of work, you can still find him on a bike, though these days the rides are a bit shorter.
