50 Influential Thought Leaders in Waste Recycling

Introduction

The global waste and recycling industry sits at the centre of one of the most consequential transformations of our time. Every year, the world generates approximately 2.24 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste, and the World Bank's 2026 What a Waste 3.0 report projects that figure could rise by 50 percent by 2050 if current trajectories continue. Roughly 30 percent of waste generated worldwide is not managed properly, ending up in open dumps, uncontrolled landfills, or simply uncollected in communities that lack the infrastructure to deal with it. Meanwhile, the global waste recycling services market is valued at USD 436.7 billion in 2026 and is expected to grow to USD 590.8 billion by 2035.

The people who shape this industry are not always the ones you hear about first. They are not always the loudest voices in the sustainability conversation, and they rarely make headlines in the same way that climate scientists or renewable energy entrepreneurs do. But their work determines whether the plastic bottle you drop in a recycling bin actually becomes something new, whether the food waste from your city's restaurants is turned into compost or methane rather than landfill gas, and whether the lithium battery from your electric vehicle is safely recovered and returned to the supply chain or ends up as a fire risk in a poorly managed facility.

This list of 50 influential thought leaders in waste collection and recycling services is a deliberate attempt to surface the voices doing the most important and original thinking in this space right now. The selection spans policy advocates, technology founders, circular economy strategists, investigative journalists, municipal waste specialists, e-waste pioneers, and practitioners working in emerging markets where the stakes are highest. Many of the names on this list are deeply mid-career voices who are actively building their platforms and will engage meaningfully with this recognition.

If your leadership team is ready to act on what these thinkers are saying, to build a culture where waste decisions are taken seriously, difficult conversations about accountability are had, and teams are aligned around sustainable outcomes, Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies globally) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with organisations around the world to make that happen. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Following Waste and Recycling Thought Leaders Matters

The failure of recycling in most countries is not primarily a consumer behaviour problem. This is the most important reframe in the entire field, and it is one that the thought leaders on this list articulate better than anyone else. The global recycling system has for decades shifted responsibility onto individual citizens by encouraging them to sort their waste, purchase products with recycling symbols on them, and feel a sense of environmental contribution through participation in collection programmes. Meanwhile, the structural economics of the system remained largely unaddressed: virgin plastic costs less to produce than recycled plastic, processing capacity has not kept pace with collection ambition, and the markets for recycled materials are volatile and fragile.

The thought leaders in this space understand this structural reality and are working to change it. They are building the policy frameworks, the investment vehicles, the technology platforms, the educational resources, and the public arguments that will determine whether the next decade sees recycling become a genuinely functional system or continue as a well-intentioned but underperforming one. Extended Producer Responsibility legislation is advancing in more jurisdictions than ever before, with over 150 EPR laws already enacted across 22 product categories in 34 US states and the District of Columbia. Deposit return schemes are operating in over 50 countries globally. AI-powered sorting technology is being deployed at material recovery facilities on every inhabited continent.

These are not abstract policy debates. They directly affect how waste is collected and processed, how much of what you discard actually becomes a new product, and how much of the environmental benefit promised by recycling programmes is actually delivered. Understanding who is driving these conversations, and following their work, is how organisations and individuals stay ahead of the regulatory and operational changes coming.

If your leadership team needs to understand how these developments affect your organisation's waste obligations, sustainability commitments, or operational model, Jonno White delivers workshops that translate complex environmental leadership challenges into practical team decisions. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

This list was built from a global search across policy institutes, industry publications, technology companies, academic institutions, advocacy organisations, and independent media. Candidates were assessed on the quality and specificity of their contribution to the waste collection and recycling field, not on follower counts or name recognition. The selection deliberately prioritises voices that are actively producing original thinking rather than recycling (in the unflattering sense) the same well-worn arguments.

Geographic diversity was a priority, with representation from the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, Africa, and Asia. Disciplinary diversity was equally important, with the final list spanning operations, policy, technology, media, finance, academia, and advocacy. The goal was a list that would be genuinely useful to a reader regardless of which part of the waste and recycling conversation they are most interested in: whether that is deposit return scheme design in Europe, AI-powered MRF operations, e-waste in the Global South, zero waste strategy in an Australian city, or the investment case for circular economy infrastructure.

Category 1: Journalists and Storytellers Shaping the Narrative

The waste and recycling industry has long suffered from a narrative problem. It is difficult to generate public interest in how waste is managed, and the complexity of the system makes it easy for greenwashing to go unchallenged. The journalists, authors, and media figures in this category have done more than almost anyone to change that, writing and broadcasting stories that make the hidden world of waste visible to audiences who would otherwise never encounter it.

1. Adam Minter | Bloomberg Opinion

Few people have spent more time inside the global scrap trade than Adam Minter, and no journalist has written about it with more authority or depth. A Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the author of two critically acclaimed books, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade and Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale, Minter spent decades living in and reporting from China, Malaysia, and the United States, giving him an unmatched vantage point on the global flows of discarded materials. His current Bloomberg beat has shifted to the business of sports, but his waste and recycling writing remains among the most widely cited in the field.

Junkyard Planet remains the definitive journalistic account of the scrap recycling industry, tracing the journey of discarded materials from American recycling bins through the global commodity markets that determine their fate. His consistent argument across both books is that the informal recycling economies of Asia and the developing world are not environmental problems but environmental assets, and that Western dismissals of these systems as backward reflect a misunderstanding of how material recovery actually works at a global scale.

2. Oliver Franklin-Wallis | British GQ / Wasteland

Oliver Franklin-Wallis is the features editor of British GQ and the author of Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters, named one of the best books of 2023 by The New Yorker, The Guardian, and Kirkus Reviews. The book grew from four years of investigative reporting across India, Ghana, the United Kingdom, and the United States, taking Franklin-Wallis from landfills in New Delhi to the inside of the UK's super-sewers, from nuclear waste facilities to the informal electronics recycling markets of Accra.

What sets Wasteland apart from almost every other book on the subject is its structural honesty: Franklin-Wallis does not primarily blame consumers for the waste crisis. He traces the failure to the economic incentives that make virgin materials cheaper than recycled ones, the regulatory frameworks that allow companies to claim products are recyclable without any requirement to fund the infrastructure that would actually recycle them, and the export networks that shift the environmental cost of waste from wealthy consumers to poor communities in the Global South.

3. Cole Rosengren | Waste Dive

Cole Rosengren is one of the most closely read journalists in the American waste and recycling industry. As a senior editor at Waste Dive, the industry's most respected digital publication, he has spent years covering the business of waste: mergers and acquisitions, regulatory developments, PFAS disposal challenges, commodity market volatility, and the evolving role of extended producer responsibility in reshaping the economics of recycling. His work is meticulous, contextualised, and deeply sourced.

Rosengren's most notable contribution has been his sustained coverage of PFAS disposal in the United States, a deeply complex topic that sits at the intersection of waste management, environmental justice, and industrial regulation. His reporting on this subject, including an expansive series he subsequently turned into a live webinar discussion with industry leaders, helped bring serious attention to one of the most difficult challenges facing waste operators. He is a journalist whose work has genuine policy influence.

4. Megan Quinn | Waste Dive

Megan Quinn is a senior journalist at Waste Dive whose coverage spans the full range of waste and recycling topics, from MRF technology and recycled commodity markets to organics management and the strategic decisions of major waste companies. Her reporting on the intersection of sustainability investment and operational practice at companies like Waste Management and Republic Services provides one of the clearest public windows into how the industry's largest players are actually managing the tension between environmental goals and financial performance.

Quinn has been particularly active covering the rollout of extended producer responsibility legislation in the United States and the technology investments companies are making in response. Her January 2026 outlook piece, co-authored with Jacob Wallace, is one of the most cited industry analyses of what the current economic environment means for recycling investment and M&A activity. She is a journalist whose depth of industry knowledge is matched by the quality of her explanatory writing.

5. Stefanie Valentic | Waste360

Stefanie Valentic is the editorial director of Waste360 and the host of Stef Talks Trash, one of the waste industry's most widely followed interview series, where she has conducted in-depth conversations with business leaders about recycling, sustainability, and the future of the industry. With more than 15 years of experience in journalism and communications, and multiple journalism awards to her name, Valentic has shaped the editorial voice of one of the industry's most important media brands.

Through Stef Talks Trash and Waste360's broader content output, Valentic has given a platform to a remarkable range of voices in the industry, from startup founders to major waste company executives to policy advocates. The series serves not just as journalism but as a connective tissue for the industry, creating conversations between people who might not otherwise have the opportunity to engage with each other's thinking. Her work has made the waste and recycling conversation more accessible, more dynamic, and significantly more inclusive.

6. Theresa Eidt | Resource Recycling

Theresa Eidt is a key editorial figure at Resource Recycling, the trade publication that has been the paper of record for the US recycling industry for decades. Her work covers the full supply chain of recycling, from collection and processing to end markets and policy, with a practical focus that makes it directly useful to recycling professionals. Resource Recycling under her editorial leadership has become one of the most reliable sources of market data and industry analysis available to recycling operators.

Eidt's contribution to the field is not just journalistic but educational. Her regular coverage of commodity pricing, end market developments, and regulatory changes gives recycling programme managers the information they need to make operational decisions. In a field where the economics change fast and the information environment can be confusing, her work provides clarity and continuity. She is a voice the industry trusts.

Category 2: Policy Architects and Advocacy Leaders

Regulatory frameworks determine the economics of recycling more than any other single factor. The policy advocates and architects in this category have dedicated their careers to building the legal and institutional frameworks that make recycling economically viable, practically achievable, and equitably distributed. Their work happens in legislatures, in government agencies, in nonprofits, and in international negotiating rooms, and it shapes the conditions under which every other part of the industry operates.

7. Keefe Harrison | The Recycling Partnership

Keefe Harrison is the founder and outgoing CEO of The Recycling Partnership, a US nonprofit that has grown from an $880,000 start-up in 2014 into an organisation that has engaged more than 70 funding partners, deployed more than $150 million in grants and investments, and reached more than half of American households through recycling system improvements. An international speaker, published author on recycling policy, and a 22-year veteran of the sector, she announced in April 2026 that she would step down from the CEO role in July 2026 after leading the organisation through its most significant growth phase. Harrison will be remembered as the person who built the modern infrastructure of US recycling advocacy from the ground up.

Her most significant contribution has been her insistence that recycling improvement requires both grassroots infrastructure investment and national policy change. Under her leadership, The Recycling Partnership evolved from a grant-making organisation focused on local programmes to a policy-focused body pushing for the federal and state legislative changes needed to fundamentally restructure how recycling is funded and implemented in the United States. Her congressional testimony and advocacy for extended producer responsibility legislation represent a strategic evolution she described as essential for achieving recycling improvements at the pace the environment requires.

8. Scott Cassel | Product Stewardship Institute

Scott Cassel founded the Product Stewardship Institute in 2000 with a mission to make manufacturers financially responsible for the waste their products generate. In the quarter-century since, PSI has helped enact over 150 EPR laws in 34 states and the District of Columbia across 22 product categories, pioneering the stakeholder engagement and consensus-building approach that is now the standard model for EPR policy development in the United States. Cassel's background includes seven years as the director of waste policy for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, which gave him deep knowledge of how state government works before he began working to change it from the outside.

His best-known professional contribution is the facilitation process PSI developed for building consensus among competing interests in EPR policy discussions. This process, described in detail in Cassel's public writing and speaking, produced the nation's first industry-run, government-mandated paint stewardship programme, which has since diverted millions of gallons of unwanted paint from landfills. He remains one of the most knowledgeable voices on the design and implementation of producer responsibility systems in any jurisdiction.

9. Ranjit Baxi | Global Recycling Foundation

Ranjit Baxi is the founding president of the Global Recycling Foundation and the person widely credited with single-handedly launching Global Recycling Day, now observed on 18 March each year with participation from governments, businesses, and communities across more than 100 countries. A veteran of the international scrap recycling industry with deep roots in the Bureau of International Recycling, Baxi has spent decades advocating for recycling as a fundamental component of the global response to climate change and resource depletion.

His argument, repeated consistently across decades of speaking and advocacy, is that recycling is not a consumer lifestyle choice but an industrial necessity: the world is throwing away over USD 50 billion annually in unrecovered electronic waste alone, and the materials inside discarded products represent a critical minerals resource that the global economy increasingly cannot afford to ignore. Global Recycling Day 2026, themed around turning waste into opportunity, reflects a message Baxi has been making long before it became mainstream.

10. Heidi Sanborn | National Stewardship Action Council

Heidi Sanborn is the founder and executive director of the National Stewardship Action Council, one of the most active EPR policy advocacy organisations in the United States. Based in California, where the regulatory environment for waste and packaging has consistently led the nation, Sanborn has been a central figure in the push for producer responsibility legislation for electronics, packaging, and other product categories across multiple states. Her work combines policy expertise, coalition building, and a willingness to engage in the legislative process at a level of detail that many advocates find daunting.

Sanborn's specific contribution to the field is the development and promotion of stewardship as a framework for understanding producer responsibility: the idea that companies that profit from products have an ethical and economic obligation to take responsibility for what happens to those products after consumers are done with them. Her work on California's packaging EPR law has been particularly significant, providing a model that other states are now actively following.

11. David Allaway | Oregon Department of Environmental Quality

David Allaway is a senior policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality's Materials Management Program, where he has spent years leading projects at the intersection of sustainable consumption, materials management, and greenhouse gas reduction. He is one of the most rigorous thinkers in the field on the question of how waste management decisions translate into actual environmental outcomes, and his analytical work on the lifecycle impacts of different materials and waste management approaches has influenced policy decisions well beyond Oregon.

Allaway's most cited contribution to the field is his persistent and well-evidenced argument that the environmental benefits attributed to recycling programmes need to be assessed more carefully, not as an argument against recycling but as a call for more honest and evidence-based evaluation of which materials recovery investments deliver the greatest environmental return. His work on greenhouse gas accounting for waste management programmes has become a reference point for environmental professionals working on climate strategies that include waste as a significant emissions source.

12. Jill Notini | AMERIPEN

Jill Notini is a senior figure at AMERIPEN, the American Institute for Packaging and the Environment, and one of the most knowledgeable people in North America on the design and implementation of packaging extended producer responsibility programmes. Her work focuses on the intersection of packaging design, recyclability, and the policy frameworks that govern how packaging waste is managed, with a particular emphasis on the practical challenges of transitioning from legislated intent to operational reality.

Notini's contribution to the field is the bridge she builds between the packaging industry's design decisions and the downstream implications for recycling systems. She has been a consistent voice in EPR programme design discussions, arguing for frameworks that create genuine recycling infrastructure investment rather than paper compliance, and her work on how recyclability is defined and measured has helped push the conversation beyond the easily gameable metrics that have allowed greenwashing to flourish in packaging sustainability claims.

Category 3: Circular Economy Strategists and Investment Leaders

The circular economy is not just a philosophical alternative to the linear economy. It is, increasingly, an investment category, a regulatory expectation, and a business model. The strategists, investors, and innovators in this category have built the institutions and frameworks that are making circular economy principles operational at scale. They work at the boundary between idealism and pragmatism, translating big ideas about keeping materials in use into venture capital theses, corporate strategies, and government procurement guidelines.

13. Ron Gonen | Closed Loop Partners

Ron Gonen is the co-founder and CEO of Closed Loop Partners, a New York-based investment firm comprising venture capital, growth equity, private equity, project finance, and an innovation centre, all focused on building the circular economy. Before founding Closed Loop, Gonen served as the Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling, and Sustainability for New York City under Mayor Bloomberg, giving him direct operational experience of how municipal waste systems actually work at scale. His 2022 book The Waste-Free World: How the Circular Economy Will Take Less, Make More, and Save the Planet remains one of the most accessible and practical accounts of the investment case for circular systems.

Under Gonen's leadership, Closed Loop Partners has become one of the most consequential institutions in the global circular economy transition, funding projects that range from advanced recycling technologies to curbside collection improvements to composting infrastructure. His March 2026 announcement of a $7.4 million partnership to improve Providence, Rhode Island's recycling system is a typical example of Closed Loop's model: combining private capital with public grants to solve infrastructure problems that neither public nor private investment alone would address.

14. Kate Daly | Closed Loop Partners

Kate Daly is the managing director and head of the Center for the Circular Economy at Closed Loop Partners, leading an innovation arm that has become one of the most prolific producers of research, frameworks, and collaborative initiatives advancing circular economy practice across multiple industries. She sits on the Sustainability Advisory Council of Novo Nordisk and brings a rigorous analytical approach to circularity challenges that might otherwise remain aspirational rather than operational.

Daly's most significant contribution has been the development of methodologies that help companies understand not just what circular economy principles mean in theory, but what specific actions they translate into at the level of product design, procurement, and end-of-life management. Her work on healthcare plastics circularity, a sector that generates enormous volumes of waste and has historically been resistant to circularity claims for safety reasons, represents exactly the kind of boundary-pushing application that distinguishes serious circular economy thinking from greenwash.

15. Rob Kaplan | Circulate Capital

Rob Kaplan is the CEO and managing partner of Circulate Capital, an investment management firm that focuses on financing companies and infrastructure that prevent plastic waste in South and Southeast Asia. Before co-founding Closed Loop Partners with Ron Gonen and later establishing Circulate Capital, Kaplan served as director of sustainability at Walmart, where he gained an understanding of how supply chain decisions at corporate scale shape the waste landscape. His work at Circulate Capital applies a systems lens to plastic pollution that treats investment as the central instrument of change.

Kaplan's analytical framework focuses on the interdependence of actors across the waste value chain, arguing that the fragmented nature of the chain, from collection to sorting to reprocessing, makes coordinated investment essential and individual company action insufficient on its own. His work to track and communicate portfolio companies' plastic reduction, greenhouse gas reductions, and supply chain impacts provides a model for how circular economy investment can be made measurable and accountable.

16. Eva Goulbourne | Littlefoot Ventures

Eva Goulbourne is the CEO and founder of Littlefoot Ventures and was named the 2025 Waste360 Changemaker, recognising leaders creating meaningful positive impact in the waste, recycling, and organics sector. Her work focuses on building ventures and strategies at the intersection of waste reduction, circular economy innovation, and environmental impact, with a particular emphasis on identifying where market mechanisms can be designed to drive systemic waste reduction rather than merely managing waste more efficiently after it has been generated.

Goulbourne's contribution to the field is her consistent insistence that the most important lever for waste reduction is not better recycling but fundamentally different product and system design. Her work with Littlefoot Ventures reflects this philosophy, supporting ventures that challenge the premise of disposability rather than optimising the management of disposable products. This upstream perspective distinguishes her thinking from most of the industry's focus on collection and processing.

17. Jo Morley | Circular Economy Club

Jo Morley is the founder of the Circular Economy Club, a global network connecting more than 3,500 circular economy professionals across 100 countries, making it one of the largest communities of practice in the field globally. She has been building this network for over a decade, with a consistent focus on making circular economy expertise accessible and applicable to practitioners working in contexts that are often overlooked by the major institutions: small cities, emerging markets, small and medium enterprises, and community-scale organisations.

Morley's most important contribution is the democratisation of circular economy expertise. The Circular Economy Club operates on the premise that the knowledge needed to design circular systems should not be the exclusive preserve of large consultancies or well-funded NGOs. By building a community where practitioners share methodologies, case studies, and contacts across sectors and geographies, she has accelerated the spread of circular economy practice in ways that no single organisation could achieve on its own.

18. Sander Defruyt | Ellen MacArthur Foundation

Sander Defruyt leads the plastics initiative at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the organisation that has done more than any other to mainstream circular economy thinking across business and government. His specific focus on plastics places him at the centre of one of the most contested material debates in the sustainability field, where the gap between industry commitments to recyclability and the operational reality of what actually gets recycled has never been more visible or more politically contentious.

Defruyt's contribution to the field is his rigorous interrogation of recyclability claims and his work to establish globally consistent standards for what it means to design packaging for genuine recyclability. His leadership of the Foundation's plastics work has produced research that policy makers and major brands use as reference material when designing EPR programmes and making packaging design decisions, and his writing on the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation in Europe has helped clarify what the regulation actually requires in practice.

Category 4: Technology Innovators and Data Pioneers

The waste and recycling industry is undergoing a technology transformation that most people outside the field have barely noticed. AI-powered cameras are identifying and tracking individual waste items as they pass through sorting facilities, generating data on material flows that was previously unknowable. Robotics are automating the picking of recyclables from conveyor belts, reducing contamination and improving recovery rates. The people in this category are building and deploying these technologies, and in doing so are creating the data infrastructure that the next phase of circular economy policy will depend on.

19. Mikela Druckman | Greyparrot AI

Mikela Druckman is the CEO and co-founder of Greyparrot AI, a London-based company that uses computer vision and machine learning to provide waste intelligence across the entire recycling value chain. In 2025 alone, Greyparrot's AI cameras analysed over 17 billion individual fibre items processed through Material Recovery Facilities across England, representing roughly 20 percent of the country's entire recycling stream. The data generated by this system is now used by recyclers, brands, packaging producers, and regulators to understand what actually happens to materials after they leave consumers' hands. Named number three in TechRound's Top 50 Women in Startups and Tech 2026, Druckman is one of the most significant technology founders in the waste sector globally.

Her co-authorship of Greyparrot's annual Waste Unwrapped report, which analyses billions of waste items to produce the most granular publicly available data on global material flows, has made the company a primary data source for EPR policy design in multiple jurisdictions. The 2025 edition revealed that aluminium's share of residue streams rose from 2.5 to 4.3 percent in a single year, a finding with direct implications for recovery infrastructure investment decisions. Her consistent argument is that waste intelligence is not just an operational tool but a systemic one: when design, policy, infrastructure, and markets share real-world data, decisions stop being made in isolation.

20. Nina Goodrich | GreenBlue

Nina Goodrich is the executive director of GreenBlue, the nonprofit that created and manages How2Recycle, the most widely used packaging recyclability labelling programme in North America. Under her leadership, How2Recycle has become the de facto standard for communicating packaging recyclability to consumers, with hundreds of brands and thousands of products now carrying its labels. The programme is based on Goodrich's foundational premise that recyclability is not a property of packaging but of packaging in context, meaning that what can be recycled depends entirely on whether the infrastructure to recycle it exists where the packaging is used.

Goodrich's contribution to the field is her insistence on definition precision in recyclability. How2Recycle's label categories, which distinguish between broadly recyclable, store drop-off recyclable, and not yet recyclable, emerged directly from her analytical work on the gap between what industry claims is recyclable and what recycling systems actually process. This granularity has been uncomfortable for some brands but has made the programme genuinely useful to consumers and has created a model that European EPR regulators have studied closely as they design their own recyclability communication requirements.

21. John Shegerian | ERI

John Shegerian is the co-founder, Chairman and CEO of ERI, the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States, operating from nine certified facilities. Shegerian has spent decades at the forefront of the e-waste recycling industry, building ERI from a small company into a national infrastructure that processes millions of pounds of electronic waste annually while meeting the highest environmental and data security standards.

His most widely cited contribution to the field is ERI's development of the zero landfill, zero incineration model for electronics recycling, which has become the benchmark for responsible e-waste management in the United States. Shegerian's partnership with Closed Loop Partners, where he now serves on the board, reflects his conviction that circular supply chains for critical minerals in electronics are a strategic economic imperative, not just an environmental aspiration. He is also the co-author of The Insecurity of Everything, a number one bestseller on Amazon exploring the intersection of data security and the electronics recycling industry.

22. Adam Sheridan | Reconomy

Adam Sheridan is a senior figure at Reconomy, one of the UK's largest waste management and circular economy service providers, where he brings an operations and technology integration perspective to the challenge of making waste data useful at scale. His LinkedIn presence is characterised by substantive original commentary on EPR implementation, waste data standards, and the practical challenges of building circular economy services that work for clients across multiple sectors.

Sheridan's contribution to the field is his focus on what happens between the policy intention and the operational reality of waste management, a gap that is frequently underestimated. His writing and speaking on the requirements of EPR compliance, the data infrastructure needed to support it, and the commercial models that make sustainable waste management financially viable for operators and clients alike offers a practitioner perspective that is often missing from the more policy-focused conversation.

23. Alec Cooley | Busch Systems

Alec Cooley has worked in the recycling field for more than three decades, most recently as a senior advisor at Busch Systems, a leading manufacturer of recycling and waste management containers. His nine years at Keep America Beautiful, where he oversaw grant programmes and behaviour-related research, gave him an unmatched understanding of how collection system design and resident education interact to determine recycling outcomes. He is a TRUE Advisor and has served on the boards of multiple recycling industry associations.

Cooley's best-known professional contribution is his popular webinar series and best practices content for professional recycling and waste reduction audiences, produced through Busch Systems. These resources, which address everything from bin placement and signage design to contamination reduction strategies, translate decades of research and operational experience into practical tools that recycling programme managers can apply immediately. In a field where practitioners often struggle to access usable guidance, his work has genuine reach and impact.

Category 5: Corporate Sustainability and Operations Leaders

The companies that actually collect, process, and recover waste are among the largest employers and most capital-intensive businesses in the environmental services sector. Their decisions about where to invest in technology, how to structure recycling programmes, and what sustainability commitments to make in public have enormous influence on the practical outcomes of the recycling system. The corporate leaders in this category are not just managing large organisations; they are shaping what industrial-scale waste management looks like, what is possible technologically, and how the industry's relationship with the communities it serves is evolving.

24. Tara Hemmer | Waste Management (WM)

Tara Hemmer joined Waste Management in 1999 and served as the company's first-ever Chief Sustainability Officer from 2021 until her elevation to Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer on 13 May 2026, making her one of the most consequential women in the history of the North American waste industry. Under her sustainability leadership, WM opened or upgraded 12 recycling facilities, opened five new renewable natural gas facilities, reduced Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 22 percent since 2021, and supported 15 Major League Baseball clubs with sustainability advisory services as the largest recycler in North America.

Hemmer's most significant public contribution has been her work to reframe sustainability as a growth lever rather than a compliance obligation within one of the world's largest waste companies. Her hosting of WM's annual sustainability forum, her keynote on the waste industry's role in addressing climate change at a Washington Post Live event, and her consistent public advocacy for recycling infrastructure investment have made her one of the most visible corporate voices making the business case for circularity at scale.

25. Ryan Cooper | Denali

Ryan Cooper is a circular economy and zero waste expert at Denali, an environmental services company, where he grew the circular economy solutions team from USD 12.5 million in revenue in 2020 to USD 41.5 million in 2024, representing 232 percent growth in four years. His work spans zero waste programme delivery, waste audits, regulated waste management, organics management, liquid waste, and hard-to-recycle material streams, making him one of the more versatile practitioners in the North American field.

Cooper's contribution to the field is his focus on the commercial viability of zero waste programmes. His work demonstrates that rigorous waste diversion, when properly designed and managed, can deliver both environmental outcomes and financial returns for corporate clients, challenging the persistent assumption that sustainability and profitability trade off against each other in waste management. His approach, which combines waste audit methodology, circular economy programme design, and operational delivery, provides a model for how environmental services companies can move beyond collection and disposal into genuine circular economy services.

26. Neil Grundon | Grundon Waste Management

Neil Grundon is the deputy chairman of Grundon Waste Management, one of the UK's longest-established independent waste management companies, and one of the most active industry voices in the UK's waste and recycling policy conversation. His regular LinkedIn commentary on regulatory developments, EPR implementation, and industry practices combines operational authority with a willingness to engage critically with policy proposals that fall short of what the industry needs to deliver genuinely improved environmental outcomes.

Grundon's contribution to the field is his consistent bridging of the gap between what regulators propose and what operators experience when they try to implement regulations in practice. His commentary on the UK government's extended producer responsibility for packaging programme has been particularly substantive, drawing on Grundon's operational experience to identify where the programme's design creates perverse incentives or places impractical burdens on waste operators. His voice represents a perspective, the experienced independent operator, that is often underrepresented in the policy conversation.

27. James Piper | Ecosurety

James Piper is a Non-Executive Director at Ecosurety, one of the UK's leading packaging compliance schemes and EPR service providers, and one of the more active and substantive voices in the UK waste industry on LinkedIn. He is also the author of The Rubbish Book (2022), a practical guide to recycling for consumers, and co-host of the Talking Rubbish podcast, which has become a significant platform for accessible waste industry conversation in the UK. His regular posts on DRS design, EPR implementation, and landfill policy bring a ground-level practitioner perspective that is frequently missing from the more high-profile industry conversation.

Piper's contribution to the field is the bridge he builds between complex regulatory change and its practical implications for the brands, retailers, and consumers trying to navigate a rapidly evolving waste compliance environment. His work at Ecosurety during his tenure as CEO helped grow the organisation from seven people to over 85, and his focus on transparency and accountability in the producer responsibility system has influenced how UK compliance schemes communicate with their members about what their obligations actually mean.

28. Adam Herriott | WRAP UK

Adam Herriott is a specialist director at WRAP, the UK's Waste and Resources Action Programme, one of the most influential waste and resource efficiency organisations in the world. His work within WRAP focuses on packaging policy, extended producer responsibility implementation, and the practical application of circular economy principles to the UK's resource management systems. With the UK's Simpler Recycling regulations beginning to take effect and EPR for packaging in its implementation phase, Herriott's work has direct operational implications for hundreds of thousands of businesses and dozens of local authorities.

Herriott's specific contribution is his detailed technical work on how packaging recyclability is assessed and communicated under the UK's new EPR framework, helping brands, retailers, and waste operators understand what the regulations actually require at the level of individual packaging components and collection systems. This kind of applied technical expertise, which bridges policy intent and operational practice, is essential for making regulatory frameworks actually achieve their stated environmental goals.

Category 6: Researchers, Academics, and Knowledge Builders

The waste and recycling field is not well served by academic research that engages with the industry's practitioners, and the practitioners are not well served by academic institutions that study waste without understanding how the system actually works. The researchers in this category represent exceptions to this pattern: academics and knowledge-builders who have made their work accessible and applicable, and whose findings have influenced policy, investment, and practice in ways that go well beyond the academic citation record.

29. Jenna Jambeck | University of Georgia

Jenna Jambeck is the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Environmental Engineering at the University of Georgia, a 2022 MacArthur Fellow, and one of the most influential researchers in the field of plastic waste and ocean pollution. Her 2015 study, published in Science and co-authored with Roland Geyer, Kara Lavender Law, and colleagues, provided the first scientifically rigorous estimate of the amount of plastic entering the world's oceans from land-based sources, a figure that has since become one of the most cited data points in the entire global sustainability conversation.

The 2015 Science study fundamentally changed how the world understood plastic pollution by providing quantitative evidence that the problem was structural and global rather than localised and behavioural. Jambeck continues to produce research on plastic waste flows, recycling systems, and the environmental fate of plastic materials, and her work has directly shaped both the United Nations plastics treaty negotiation process and the design of EPR frameworks for packaging in multiple countries.

30. Roland Geyer | UC Santa Barbara

Roland Geyer is a professor in the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara and the lead author of the landmark 2017 study in Science Advances, co-authored with Jenna R. Jambeck and Kara Lavender Law, that provided the first global analysis of all plastic ever produced, its uses, and its fate. That paper found that of the 8,300 million metric tonnes of virgin plastics produced to that point, only 9 percent had been recycled, and it became one of the most cited academic papers in the history of sustainability research.

Geyer's contribution to the field is the rigour and scale of his lifecycle assessment work on materials, which has provided the empirical foundation for policy arguments about where recycling investment delivers genuine environmental benefit and where it does not. His continued research on the plastics lifecycle and the limits of recycling as a primary response to plastic pollution has made him one of the most important critical voices in the field: someone whose work is cited both by advocates for better recycling and by advocates for reducing plastic production, because his data is robust enough to inform both arguments.

31. Dr Costas Velis | University of Leeds

Costas Velis is an associate professor in the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Leeds and one of the world's leading researchers on solid waste management in low and middle-income countries, with a particular focus on the informal waste sector: the hundreds of millions of waste pickers and informal recyclers who provide the backbone of recycling systems in cities across the Global South. His research engages with the waste system as it actually functions in most of the world, rather than as it operates in the high-income countries that dominate the mainstream conversation.

Velis is the co-author of foundational work on the contribution of the informal recycling sector to urban resource recovery, and his research on how formal and informal waste systems interact has significant implications for how development organisations, city governments, and international policy bodies approach waste management in low-income contexts. His work on the scale of mismanaged plastic waste in emerging economies, and the role of informal sector formalisation in addressing it, is among the most practically useful research being produced in the global waste field.

32. Winnie Lau | Pew Charitable Trusts

Winnie Lau is the project director for preventing ocean plastic pollution at the Pew Charitable Trusts, where she has led some of the most rigorous research on what systemic changes are actually needed to reduce plastic pollution over the next decade. Her work at Pew contributed to the foundational 2020 study Breaking the Plastic Wave, co-published with SYSTEMIQ, which modelled 1,000 scenarios for global plastic pollution reduction and identified the most effective and cost-efficient combinations of policy, technology, and consumer behaviour change.

Lau's specific contribution is the modelling and analytical framework used in Breaking the Plastic Wave, which provided, for the first time, a quantitative basis for evaluating which interventions deliver the greatest plastic pollution reduction per dollar invested. Her conclusion that two key tools, reuse and return systems and reduction of plastic production for packaging, could together prevent 97 percent of future plastic pollution by 2040 has become a central reference point in the United Nations plastics treaty negotiations.

Category 7: UK, European, and Australian Field Leaders

Some of the most sophisticated operational and policy work in the world is happening in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and Australia, where regulatory ambition has consistently run ahead of North American frameworks. The voices in this category are leading the implementation of deposit return schemes, extended producer responsibility programmes, consistent collections requirements, and circular economy strategies that are being closely watched by policy makers around the world as models of what ambitious regulation can achieve.

33. Sarah Edwards | CIWM

Sarah Edwards is the chief executive of the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management, the UK's primary professional membership body for the waste and resource management sector, with members across the UK and in more than 50 other countries. Her leadership of CIWM has placed the organisation at the centre of the UK's regulatory transformation, including the implementation of EPR for packaging, consistent collections, and the government's resources and waste strategy.

Edwards' contribution to the field is her insistence that the waste and resource management sector deserves recognition as a skilled, professional, and economically significant industry rather than as a background service that society takes for granted. Under her leadership, CIWM has become more active in public advocacy, industry skills development, and the green jobs agenda, positioning waste management as a central part of the UK's transition to a circular economy.

34. Libby Peake | Green Alliance

Libby Peake is the head of resource policy at Green Alliance, a UK think tank that works with senior politicians and business leaders to advance ambitious environmental policy. Her work on waste and resource policy sits within Green Alliance's broader programme of environmental advocacy, and her regular publications and commentary on EPR implementation, packaging reform, and the UK's recycling targets have made her one of the most quoted voices in the UK waste policy debate.

Peake's contribution to the field is the quality of her analytical writing on the gap between UK government rhetoric on recycling and the policies actually needed to achieve stated targets. Her work on consistent collections, EPR for packaging, and the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation's implications for UK producers has helped the debate move beyond positional arguments to evidence-based analysis of what specific policy choices will and will not deliver.

35. Joe Papineschi | Eunomia Research

Joe Papineschi is a principal consultant at Eunomia Research and Consulting, one of Europe's leading waste and resource management consultancies, where he works on a wide range of policy advisory, modelling, and strategic projects for government clients, businesses, and international organisations. Eunomia developed the Hermes modelling tool used by local authorities and national governments to assess the environmental and financial performance of different collection systems, and Papineschi's work sits within that analytical tradition.

His contribution to the field is the application of rigorous quantitative analysis to waste policy questions that are often debated on the basis of assertion rather than evidence. Eunomia's work under his direction has informed EPR scheme design, deposit return scheme economics, and collection system comparisons in multiple European countries, and his regular writing and speaking on these topics brings the analytical precision of a consulting environment to a public conversation that benefits from it.

36. Tamsin Larkin | Ecosurety

Tamsin Larkin is a senior figure at Ecosurety, a UK compliance scheme and sustainability consultancy, and one of the more active and substantive voices in the UK's EPR and packaging compliance conversation on LinkedIn. Her regular posts on regulatory developments, producer obligations, and the practical implications of the UK's EPR for packaging programme combine genuine technical knowledge with accessible writing that makes complex regulatory material understandable to the businesses affected by it.

Larkin's contribution to the field is her focus on what regulatory compliance actually requires in practice for the brands, retailers, and importers who are obligated under the UK's packaging EPR framework. Her work helps organisations navigate the gap between what the regulations say and what they need to do operationally to comply, which is a genuinely difficult translation problem in a regulatory environment that is still evolving rapidly.

37. Debbie Smith | ESA

Debbie Smith is the chief executive of the Environmental Services Association, the UK's leading trade body for the waste and resource management industry, representing companies that collectively manage the majority of the UK's commercial and industrial waste. Her leadership of ESA places her at the centre of the UK industry's engagement with government on the regulatory changes currently reshaping the sector, from EPR implementation to consistent collections to digital waste tracking.

Smith's contribution to the field is her ability to represent the operational realities of waste management to policy makers who may not have deep familiarity with how the industry works in practice. Her advocacy for regulatory frameworks that are ambitious enough to drive real environmental improvement but operationally achievable enough to be implemented without service disruption reflects a pragmatic approach that has made ESA an effective interlocutor with government across multiple administrations.

38. Simon Ellin | Alupro

Simon Ellin is the chief executive of Alupro, the Aluminium Packaging Recycling Organisation, which manages the UK aluminium packaging recycling compliance scheme and has been instrumental in driving aluminium recycling rates in the UK to among the highest in the world. His decades of experience in packaging recycling give him a deep understanding of how compliance schemes function, what makes them effective, and how they need to evolve to support a more ambitious circular economy.

Ellin's contribution to the field is his consistent advocacy for aluminium as a genuinely circular material, making the case that the energy and carbon benefits of recycling aluminium, which requires only 5 percent of the energy needed to produce virgin aluminium from bauxite, make it one of the most compelling arguments for recycling investment. His work on how deposit return schemes interact with existing kerbside collection systems has been particularly valuable in the UK debate over DRS design.

39. Marcus Gover | WRAP

Marcus Gover is a former chief executive of WRAP and one of the UK's most experienced waste and resources professionals. During his time leading WRAP, he was central to several of the most significant waste reduction and recycling initiatives in UK history, including the Courtauld Commitment, which has reduced the UK's food and drink waste by hundreds of thousands of tonnes, and WRAP's work on the Circular Economy Package that shaped UK and EU waste regulation for years.

Gover's contribution to the field is his ability to build consensus across the competing interests of business, government, and civil society on waste and resource reduction initiatives. The Courtauld Commitment's model, bringing major food retailers and manufacturers together around voluntary but ambitious and measurable commitments, has been replicated in other countries and other sectors precisely because it proved that voluntary collaboration could achieve outcomes that regulation alone would struggle to deliver quickly.

40. Kate Langford | APCO Australia

Kate Langford is the chief executive of the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation, the body responsible for managing Australia's voluntary packaging sustainability framework and increasingly its engagement with mandatory EPR for packaging as regulation evolves. Her leadership of APCO places her at the centre of Australia's packaging sustainability conversation, working with producers, retailers, local governments, and recyclers to drive progress on packaging recyclability, recycled content, and waste reduction.

Langford's contribution to the field is her work in advancing Australia's approach to packaging EPR at a moment when the country's regulatory framework is evolving significantly. Her engagement with the National Packaging Targets and the policy discussions around mandatory producer responsibility provides a perspective on packaging sustainability that is grounded in the specific challenges and opportunities of the Australian context, including the logistics of large-geography low-density collection systems and the challenges of building domestic end markets for recovered materials.

41. Monica Havelaar | Circular Flanders

Monica Havelaar is a senior figure at Circular Flanders, the government body responsible for accelerating the circular economy transition in the Flanders region of Belgium, which has become one of the most advanced circular economy jurisdictions in Europe. Her work spans business support, policy implementation, and the creation of sector-specific circular economy programmes that translate the region's circular economy strategy into operational reality for businesses across the economy.

Havelaar's contribution to the field is her work at the implementation level of circular economy policy, demonstrating what it actually takes to move beyond strategy documents and political commitments to measurable reductions in material consumption and waste generation. Flanders has consistently achieved some of the highest recycling and waste diversion rates in Europe, and the policy and operational frameworks that underpin those rates are directly relevant to other jurisdictions working to improve their own performance.

Category 8: Advocates, Educators, and Independent Voices

Not all of the most important thinking in the waste and recycling field happens within institutions. Some of the most influential voices are independent advocates, educators, and communicators who build public understanding, challenge conventional wisdom, and make the complexity of waste systems accessible to audiences that institutional voices cannot reach. This category celebrates the writers, campaigners, researchers, and practitioners who contribute to the field from outside the traditional structures of industry, government, and academia.

42. Susan Collins | Container Recycling Institute

Susan Collins is the president of the Container Recycling Institute, the US organisation that has spent more than two decades building the evidence base for deposit return schemes and making the case for their expansion to jurisdictions that do not yet have them. Her decades of research on beverage container recycling rates, the economics of deposit systems versus curbside recycling, and the environmental benefits of high-recovery collection systems have made CRI the primary reference organisation for anyone working on DRS policy in North America.

Collins' specific contribution is her sustained, evidence-based advocacy for deposit return schemes as a superior collection mechanism for beverage containers relative to curbside recycling. Her research demonstrating the consistently higher recovery rates achieved by DRS programmes across multiple jurisdictions has been central to the policy arguments that have brought new deposit systems to Oregon, Colorado, and other US states, and her work continues to be cited in debates about beverage container policy in jurisdictions around the world.

43. Sophie Thomas | Thomas.Matthews

Sophie Thomas is a circular design specialist and co-director of Thomas.Matthews, a design and strategy consultancy that brings circular economy principles to the built environment, product design, and communications projects. A fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, she has been one of the most consistent voices in the UK making the case that design is the most important leverage point in the circular economy transition: that what can be recycled, repaired, or reused is determined primarily by how things are designed, not by how hard people try to recycle them after the fact.

Thomas's contribution to the field is her work at the intersection of circular design theory and practice, producing projects and publications that demonstrate what circular principles look like in specific material and design contexts. Her TEDx talk on circular design and her extensive writing and speaking on the built environment, events, and communications have made circular design thinking accessible to audiences including architects, brand managers, event producers, and communications professionals who might not otherwise engage with waste and resource management as a design challenge.

44. Dana Gunders | ReFED

Dana Gunders is the executive director of ReFED, the leading US organisation focused on reducing food waste across the food system, and one of the most effective advocates for food waste reduction as both an environmental and economic priority. Her work at ReFED builds on decades of food waste research and advocacy, including her time at NRDC where she was the lead author of Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill, still one of the most influential documents in the US food waste conversation.

Gunders's contribution to the field is her consistent focus on food waste as a systems problem requiring solutions at every stage of the food supply chain, not just at the household level where most public communication about food waste is directed. Her work at ReFED, including the organisation's Food Waste Action Guide and the Roadmap to Reduce US Food Waste by 50 Percent, provides both the data and the actionable framework that businesses, policy makers, and community organisations need to make meaningful progress on food waste reduction.

45. Anne-Marie Bonneau | Zero Waste Chef

Anne-Marie Bonneau, known as the Zero Waste Chef, is a San Francisco-based food blogger, author, and advocate who has built one of the most accessible and practically useful platforms for communicating zero waste principles to a general audience. Her book The Zero-Waste Chef: Plant-Forward Recipes and Tips for a Sustainable Kitchen and Planet brings the philosophy of waste reduction into the everyday decisions of home cooks, making the connection between what happens in individual kitchens and the broader food waste and packaging waste crisis.

Bonneau's contribution to the field is her ability to make zero waste principles concrete, achievable, and appealing to an audience that might be deterred by the complexity of the industrial recycling conversation. Her writing on zero waste cooking, packaging avoidance, and the relationship between food systems and waste has reached a mass audience in ways that policy-focused advocates rarely achieve, and her work sits at the important intersection of consumer behaviour change and systemic critique of the industrial food and packaging system.

46. Grace Ofori-Parku | GreenAd Ghana

Grace Ofori-Parku is a waste management and circular economy practitioner based in Ghana, bringing a perspective on the global waste crisis that is shaped by direct experience of how waste systems function, and often fail to function, in a West African context. Her work on sustainable waste collection, informal recycling systems, and the intersection of waste management with community health and economic development reflects a set of challenges that are simultaneously local and globally significant.

Ofori-Parku's contribution to the field is her insistence on the agency and expertise of practitioners working in contexts that the mainstream waste and recycling conversation frequently treats only as recipients of waste from wealthy countries rather than as active participants in the development of solutions. Her work on building community-based collection infrastructure and her engagement with the informal recycling sector brings a perspective that is essential for any global account of where the waste and recycling field needs to go next.

47. Pankaj Batra | Recykal

Pankaj Batra is a co-founder of Recykal, an Indian technology platform that connects waste generators, processors, and recyclers through a digital marketplace, addressing one of the most significant structural gaps in the Indian waste management system: the fragmentation and informality of the recycling supply chain. Recykal's platform has processed millions of tonnes of recyclable material and created transparent, auditable records of material flows that are increasingly required under India's extended producer responsibility regulations for packaging, electronics, and batteries.

Batra's contribution to the field is his work building the digital infrastructure needed to formalise and scale recycling supply chains in a large, complex, rapidly developing economy. India's EPR framework for packaging, electronics, and batteries creates enormous demand for the kind of transparent, verified material flow data that Recykal provides, and his work positions the company at the centre of a significant regulatory transition that other emerging market economies are watching closely.

48. Gretchen Carey | G.Carey Sustainability

Gretchen Carey has spent more than 15 years working across sustainability and recycling programme management, including seven years as president of MassRecycle, co-hosting more than 50 podcast episodes on recycling education, and co-founding GreenLabs Recycling, which provides hyperlocal laboratory plastic recycling services in Greater Boston. She recently launched G.Carey Sustainability, offering guidance on state regulatory waste ban compliance and zero waste strategy, and holds the credentials of LEED Green Associate and TRUE Zero Waste Advisor.

Carey's contribution to the field is her combination of programme management expertise, public education experience, and practitioner credentials across a range of recycling and zero waste contexts. Her work with GreenLabs Recycling addresses a specific and persistent gap in laboratory waste management, where the recycling of clean plastic lab consumables is both feasible and impactful but has historically been underinvested due to the specialised logistics involved. Her willingness to build an organisation around that specific problem reflects the kind of focused, practical problem-solving that the recycling field needs more of.

49. Jared Blumenfeld | California Environmental Protection Agency

Jared Blumenfeld served as secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency under Governor Gavin Newsom, overseeing one of the largest and most ambitious environmental regulatory programmes in the world, including California's SB 1383 organic waste reduction mandate, the state's packaging EPR legislation, and a range of climate and materials management initiatives that have given California a global profile as a leader in environmental policy innovation.

Blumenfeld's contribution to the field is his work translating environmental ambition into operational regulatory frameworks in a jurisdiction that has the scale and political will to set global precedents. California's SB 1383 requirement that local jurisdictions establish organic waste collection and food recovery programmes has been described by experts as a blueprint for reducing landfill methane emissions that could be applied nationally and internationally. His broader work at CalEPA placed climate and circular economy considerations at the centre of California's regulatory framework in ways that are influencing policy design globally.

50. Jonno White | Consult Clarity

The thinkers on this list identify the problems. They build the frameworks, produce the research, advocate for the policies, and create the technologies that make better waste management possible. But knowing what needs to change is different from being able to lead the people and teams through the change itself. Jonno White is a Brisbane-based leadership consultant, bestselling author, and Certified Working Genius Facilitator who works with organisations navigating the leadership challenges that accompany large-scale operational and strategic change.

Whether a waste company is restructuring its operations around new EPR obligations, a corporate sustainability team is trying to build a zero waste programme that sticks, or a council is managing the cultural shift required by a new collection system, the people challenges are as real as the technical ones. Jonno's book Step Up or Step Out, which has sold over 10,000 copies globally, addresses exactly those challenges: the difficult conversations, the performance accountability, and the team dynamics that determine whether strategies get implemented or stay in documents. To discuss how Jonno can support your team through the leadership dimensions of your waste and circular economy work, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several remarkable people were seriously considered for this list but did not make the final 50. Ellen MacArthur, the British sailor who founded the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and has done more than almost anyone to popularise circular economy thinking globally, would appear on most lists of this kind. Her foundation's work underpins much of the policy and business framework that the people on this list operate within. We deliberately moved past these household names to surface fresher voices, and several of the Foundation's operational leaders, including Sander Defruyt (number 18), are featured on the list in their own right.

Brené Brown, Adam Grant, Simon Sinek, and other major leadership voices occasionally touch on sustainability themes but are not field-specific voices in waste collection and recycling services, and their scale and public profile means their inclusion would crowd out the mid-career practitioners and emerging international voices that make this list genuinely useful.

Tom Szaky of TerraCycle, whose work on hard-to-recycle material streams and consistent public presence on circular packaging systems represents a genuine contribution to the field, was considered and very nearly included. His exclusion was a judgment call based on the availability of alternatives with stronger operational depth in collection and recycling services specifically.

Keefe Harrison, whose entry appears at number 7, was announced as stepping down from the CEO role at The Recycling Partnership in July 2026. Her entry has been written to reflect her founding role and 12-year tenure rather than a current title, which was in transition at time of publication.

Common Mistakes When Engaging With Waste and Recycling Thought Leadership

The most expensive mistake organisations make is treating recycling as a communications exercise rather than an operational one. When sustainability commitments are written by marketing teams rather than informed by operational reality, they routinely promise outcomes that the systems available cannot deliver. Following the voices on this list will quickly reveal the gap between what most organisations claim about their waste and recycling performance and what the evidence actually shows.

A second common mistake is focusing exclusively on collection rates while ignoring end markets. The recycling system is not complete when material is placed in a bin or even when it arrives at a processing facility. It is complete only when that material is reprocessed into a usable secondary material and sold into a market. Many organisations and governments report recycling rates that count collection rather than actual material recovery, a distinction that several voices on this list, including Adam Minter, Oliver Franklin-Wallis, and Roland Geyer, have spent years making visible.

Third, many organisations confuse recyclability with recycling. A product labelled as recyclable is not necessarily being recycled. As Nina Goodrich's work at GreenBlue makes clear, recyclability is a contextual property, not an intrinsic one: a container may be technically recyclable but not actually recycled in the communities where it is used, because the infrastructure does not exist there to collect, sort, and process it.

Fourth, the informal recycling sector's contribution to global material recovery is almost universally underestimated in corporate sustainability reporting. Dr Costas Velis's research makes clear that informal waste pickers and recyclers recover enormous volumes of material in cities across the Global South, often with minimal infrastructure or institutional support. Circular economy strategies that ignore this sector, or that treat its formalisation as an afterthought, miss a significant existing resource.

Fifth, organisations consistently underestimate the speed of regulatory change. The EPR landscape in both the United States and Europe is evolving faster than most corporate compliance calendars anticipate. Following the policy advocates on this list, including Scott Cassel, Heidi Sanborn, and Libby Peake, is one of the most practical things a sustainability professional can do to stay ahead of the regulatory changes that will affect their organisation's waste obligations within the next three to five years.

Implementation Guide: Building Your Waste and Recycling Thought Leadership Diet

The first step is to identify which sub-discipline of the waste and recycling conversation is most relevant to your organisation's current challenges. If you are a corporate sustainability professional managing packaging EPR compliance, the policy advocates in Category 2 should be your primary reading. If you are a waste company operator looking at technology investment, Category 4's technology innovators are your most relevant voices. If you are trying to understand the structural economics of the recycling system, start with the journalists and storytellers in Category 1.

The second step is to follow each relevant person on LinkedIn and read their posts consistently for 30 days before forming a view. The quality of thought leadership in this field is not always apparent from a single article or post. It becomes visible through the pattern of someone's thinking over time, the consistency of their argument, the rigour of their evidence, and the honesty of their engagement with counterarguments.

Third, identify the publications and platforms that aggregate the best thinking in the space. Waste Dive, Waste360, Resource Recycling, Recycling International, and letsrecycle.com are the publications most consistently cited by the practitioners on this list. Subscribe to their newsletters. Not everything they publish will be relevant to your work, but they provide a reliable current of industry intelligence that no individual practitioner can replicate alone.

Fourth, look for the overlap points between the thinkers on this list. The most important conversations in the field are happening at the intersection of policy, technology, and investment: how EPR policy design shapes recycling technology investment, how recycling data infrastructure enables better policy design, and how investment capital is allocated across a value chain that runs from collection through to secondary material markets.

Finally, consider bringing the leadership conversation into your organisation. The people on this list are the thinkers. Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies globally) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, is the person you bring in when you are ready to act on what they say. Whether that means restructuring how your team manages waste obligations, building alignment around an ambitious sustainability commitment, or equipping your leaders with the conversation skills to drive operational change, Jonno works with organisations around the world to make it happen. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the most influential thought leaders in waste collection and recycling services globally?

The most influential voices span several disciplines. For investigative journalism, Adam Minter and Oliver Franklin-Wallis are essential. For circular economy investment, Ron Gonen and Rob Kaplan lead the conversation. For EPR policy, Keefe Harrison and Scott Cassel have the deepest expertise in North America, while Sarah Edwards and Libby Peake lead the UK conversation. For recycling technology, Mikela Druckman at Greyparrot AI is one of the most significant emerging voices globally. For academic research, Jenna Jambeck and Roland Geyer have produced the most cited foundational work on plastic waste flows.

What is the best way to stay current on waste and recycling industry developments?

The most efficient approach is to subscribe to the daily newsletters from Waste Dive and Waste360, follow the journalists listed in Category 1 of this blog on LinkedIn, and track the publications of the policy organisations in Category 2. For European and UK developments, letsrecycle.com and WRAP's research outputs are essential. For international developments, the Global Recycling Foundation and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation produce regular substantive content.

How is AI changing waste collection and recycling services?

AI is being applied at several points in the recycling value chain. At materials recovery facilities, computer vision systems like those built by Greyparrot AI are analysing waste streams in real time, identifying material types and tracking what is recovered versus what goes to residue. Robotics are being used to automate the picking of recyclables from conveyor belts, improving speed and accuracy over manual sorting. In collection operations, route optimisation software is using sensor data from smart bins to reduce the number of collection runs needed, cutting fuel consumption and operational costs.

What is extended producer responsibility and why does it matter for recycling?

Extended producer responsibility is a policy approach that makes the companies that put products and packaging onto the market financially responsible for managing those products and packaging at end of life. Rather than having municipal governments and taxpayers fund collection and recycling infrastructure, EPR places the cost on producers, who then have a financial incentive to design products and packaging that are cheaper to collect, sort, and reprocess. EPR programmes are now in place or in development in dozens of countries and US states, and the advocates and architects in Category 2 of this list are the people doing the most important work to design these programmes well.

Can I hire someone to facilitate workshops on circular economy leadership for my team?

Jonno White, host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, 150+ countries) and a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with leadership teams across the waste, resources, sustainability, and corporate sectors to develop the team culture and leadership practices needed to translate circular economy strategy into operational reality. Many organisations find that the hardest part of a sustainability transformation is not knowing what to do but having the conversations, making the decisions, and aligning the team to actually do it. To discuss how Jonno can support your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How was this list compiled?

This list was built from research across policy institutes, industry publications, technology companies, academic institutions, advocacy organisations, and independent media globally. The selection criteria prioritised people who are actively producing original thinking, who bring expertise and credential in waste collection and recycling services specifically, and who represent genuine geographic, disciplinary, and demographic diversity. The goal was a list that reflects the full range of the field's most important conversations, with particular attention to voices from outside the institutions that typically dominate these rankings.

Final Thoughts

The waste and recycling conversation is not short of good intentions. What it is sometimes short of is honest accounting, operational rigour, and leadership that is willing to have the difficult conversations about why recycling so often fails to deliver on its promise. The 50 voices on this list are doing the work of providing that honesty, rigour, and leadership, each in their own discipline and from their own vantage point.

What they collectively understand, and what the best research in the field confirms, is that the waste crisis is not primarily a problem of consumer behaviour. It is a problem of system design, economic incentives, regulatory architecture, and investment allocation. The consumers who dutifully sort their recycling are not the ones who designed the systems that determine whether that sorting actually produces a useful outcome. The thought leaders on this list are the ones working to change those systems.

If you lead a team that is grappling with the leadership and culture dimensions of that challenge, Jonno White works with organisations globally to help teams have the difficult conversations, make the aligned decisions, and build the culture that sustainable practice requires. His podcast The Leadership Conversations has produced more than 230 episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries, and his book Step Up or Step Out is available on Amazon.

Step Up or Step Out on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD

Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read

For more on how leadership teams can navigate the difficult conversations and accountability challenges that accompany major strategic change, including sustainability transformations, check out the Consult Clarity blog at consultclarity.org/news-updates. Leaders who master these conversations are better equipped to drive the kind of cultural change that circular economy and waste reduction strategies require.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/news-updates