circular-economy
(47)
Elizabeth Layne
Elizabeth Layne is the Chief Marketing Officer of Rebag, the New York-based e-commerce company that buys, sells and trades secondhand luxury handbags and accessories. A Brown and Harvard Business School graduate, she has spent her career building marketing engines for fast-growing consumer brands - launching Birchbox's marketing while still in business school, running brand and retail marketing at Bonobos before its Walmart acquisition, and scaling Appear Here across London, Paris and New York. At Rebag she has helped turn data tools like the Clair Report into marketing that pushes luxury resale toward a mainstream audience.
Nicks Ericsson
Nicks Ericsson is the Chief Marketing Officer of KEEN Footwear, the Portland-based outdoor shoe company, a role he took on in 2024. A Swedish-trained brand marketer with more than 20 years across fashion, sport, and footwear, he spent over a decade at UGG, where he built the brand's first circular-economy program and pushed its regenerative-agriculture pledge across a million acres of farmland. Earlier he helped scale premium labels including J.Lindeberg and Justin Timberlake's William Rast, and he co-founded The AND Agency to advise companies on responsible brand and sustainability strategy. His stated aim at KEEN is to make it 'the most trusted brand in the world' through consistency and transparency rather than moonshot promises.
Onney Crawley
Onney Crawley is the Chief Marketing Officer of Goodwill Industries International, where she leads brand management, creative, digital, public relations, consumer insights and corporate communications across roughly 3,300 stores and hundreds of job service centers. A University of Michigan MBA, she built a career growing billion-dollar brands at General Mills, Kellogg, Mars/Wrigley, Sears and Serta Simmons Bedding before turning her marketing firepower toward a 122-year-old mission brand and its unlikely rise as a Gen Z thrift obsession.
Steve Huang
Steve Huang is the founder and CEO of KiWi New Energy, a Taiwan-born, San Mateo-based startup building what he calls an operating system for global renewable energy. A serial green entrepreneur with more than 15 years across the semiconductor and solar value chain, Huang went from NVIDIA and public silicon-wafer ventures to a near-total collapse when Chinese rivals undercut his micro-inverter business, then rebuilt around an AI-driven energy datacenter that matches clean supply with retail and small-business demand in real time.
Ian Lowe
Ian Lowe is the founder and CEO of Arduro Sustainable Rubber, a clean-technology company turning end-of-life tires and waste rubber back into high-value raw materials. A former JPMorgan financial controller and Piper Jaffray project-finance banker, Lowe spotted a University of Louisville research project posted online and built it into a company commercializing a patented chloramine devulcanization process that recovers rubber, carbon black and processing oils at a roughly 95% reuse rate. Arduro's first product, ELDARIX r1000 recovered carbon black, is aimed at tire and rubber manufacturers looking to cut carbon footprints while keeping performance.
Marleen Vogelaar
Marleen Vogelaar is a Dutch entrepreneur who co-founded Shapeways in 2007, helped build it into the world's largest 3D printing marketplace, left in 2014 to start the on-demand apparel company Ziel, and then returned to Shapeways as CEO in December 2024 after the company went bankrupt - buying back the brand and rebuilding it around a leaner, B2B, profit-first model. A former competitive heptathlete and industrial engineer, she is known for pairing operational discipline with an insistence that a company's mission should not be hostage to its investors, an idea she put into practice by converting Ziel to steward-ownership.
Michael Marmo
Michael Marmo is the founder and CEO of CurbWaste, a New York-based software platform for waste haulers. A fourth-generation waste industry professional, Marmo started as a scale operator at a family transfer station, built a NYC hauling company called Curbside, then sold it in 2021 to focus on the software he had built to run it. CurbWaste now serves ~150 haulers across roughly 40 states and has raised about $50M in total funding, including a $28M Series B in October 2025 led by Socium Ventures.
Ryan Begin
Ryan Begin is the co-founder and CEO of Divert, a Concord, Massachusetts impact-technology company that grew from a two-person idea in 2007 into a nationwide network of anaerobic digestion facilities. Divert prevents wasted food across roughly 7,800 retail locations, donates edible surplus, and turns the rest into renewable natural gas. A Maine native and Clarkson-trained electrical engineer, Begin left Raytheon to build the company alongside co-founder Nick Whitman.
Yishai Lehavi
Yishai Lehavi is the co-founder and CEO of TULU, a New York and Tel Aviv-born proptech company that turns dead lobby space in apartment buildings into 24/7 on-demand rental hubs for vacuums, gaming consoles, e-scooters and household goods. A trained architect who once built a mobile app to redistribute passengers on crowded trains, Lehavi met co-founder Yael Shemer at MIT's designX accelerator and bet the company on a simple idea: people want access to things, not ownership of them. TULU now serves more than 500,000 residents across 60 cities on both sides of the Atlantic and has raised roughly $53M in total funding.
Ben Parry
Ben Parry is the CEO of Compost Crew, a Rockville, Maryland public benefit corporation turning food scraps into soil across the Washington, D.C. region. After more than a decade financing solar and wind projects on five continents, he bought a scrappy three-truck compost hauler in 2018 and grew it into one of the Mid-Atlantic's largest organics recyclers, with more than 20,000 customers, a 40-truck fleet, and a network of local Compost Outpost sites that close the loop between kitchen buckets and nearby farms.
Ellie Cunningham
Ellie Cunningham is the CEO of Canoa, a Brooklyn-based design-technology company building a browser canvas that unifies mood boards, scaled floor plans, real product data and FF&E schedules for interior designers. A Pratt-trained interior designer who spent years running global design operations at WeWork, she stepped up from COO to chief executive in October 2024 and is steering Canoa toward a circular, low-carbon future for commercial furniture, where good pieces get reused instead of dumped.
Jamal Burki
Jamal Burki is the co-founder and CEO of Renewance, Inc., an Elmhurst, Illinois company that manages industrial and grid-scale batteries across their full lifecycle - installation, monitoring, decommissioning, repurposing, and recycling. A former Motorola telecom engineer turned energy-storage operator, he built Renewance in 2015 with two ex-GE Energy Storage colleagues to solve a problem few were watching: what happens to the millions of batteries powering the clean-energy transition once they wear out. Under his leadership the company has commissioned and serviced over 20 gigawatt-hours of storage, decommissioned more than 100 megawatt-hours, and built RenewanceConnect, an AI-assisted platform for battery asset management and regulatory compliance.
Kazuhiko Nishioka
Kazuhiko Nishioka is the co-founder and CEO of Sun Metalon, a Japan-origin, Chicago-area climate-tech company decarbonizing the metal industry. A former Nippon Steel engineer with a materials science background from Northwestern University, he built a patented, near zero-emission heating technology that turns metal scrap, sludge and swarf into clean, reusable metal pucks on-site. Founded in 2021, Sun Metalon has raised roughly $42M in total funding, partnered with Toyota on aluminum recycling, and drawn Nippon Steel's first venture investment in its 100-plus-year history.
Kristy Caylor
Kristy Caylor is the founder and CEO of Trashie, the first scaled recycling-and-rewards platform in the US, whose internet-famous Take Back Bag lets people stuff a closet's worth of unwanted clothes and old gadgets into a prepaid mailer and get rewarded in TrashieCash to spend at places like Sephora and Uber Eats. An industrial engineer by training who spent two decades in fashion (Gap, Banana Republic Japan, Gap's Product RED, and the ethical-luxury label Maiyet she co-founded), Caylor built Trashie out of For Days, the circular apparel brand she launched in 2018. Her bet is that sustainability wins when it is convenient and fun rather than guilt-driven, and the numbers back her: hundreds of thousands of bags sold and millions of items kept out of landfills.
Jean Pierre Azañedo
Jean Pierre Azañedo is the CEO and co-founder of Zero Waste Co. (ZWC) and CoreZero, a Miami-based climate-tech venture that turns food waste and other discarded material into tradable carbon credits. A second-time founder from Peru, he previously built Kanay into that country's leading waste-management company before it was acquired by France's Séché Group. In 2023 CoreZero serialized the world's first carbon credits generated from food-waste diversion, working with the Mexican food-banking network. Azañedo's thesis is simple and stubborn: waste has boundless value, and nobody makes something just to throw it away.
Caroline Vanderlip
Caroline Vanderlip is the founder and CEO of Re:Dish, a Brooklyn-based reusable foodware company that swaps single-use containers for durable, USA-made ones, then collects, sterilizes, and redistributes up to 75,000 items a day from an automated industrial warewashing plant. After three decades launching businesses inside NBC, CNBC, AT&T, and her own publishing-tech ventures, she traded media for dishwashing in her sixties, betting that the most radical thing a company can do is wash its own plates and use them again.
Howard Yuh
Howard Yuh is a plasma physicist turned founder who is trying to break China's grip on magnesium by pulling the metal out of the ocean. As CEO and cofounder of Tidal Metals, the New Jersey deeptech he spun out of his earlier desalination venture GreenBlu, he uses an adsorption temperature-swing vapor pump - a trick borrowed from fusion research - to extract magnesium salt from seawater with only electricity, no mining, and no waste. The company raised $8.5M in seed funding led by DCVC in 2024 and won the World Economic Forum's Sustainable Mining Challenge the same year.
Nick Benavides
Nick Benavides is the cofounder and CEO of Everywhere Apparel, a Los Angeles materials-science company that turns cotton waste into 100% recycled, GRS-certified blank apparel through its CirCot process - no water, no dyes, no microplastics. A Stanford religious-studies grad who went from Bain to helping start the trading app Robinhood, he pivoted from finance to fashion after he and two co-founders, frustrated by the lack of genuinely sustainable band merch for their indie record label, decided to build the supply chain themselves. Everywhere now produces recycled garments for artists like Chappell Roan, Paramore, Wilco and Dead & Co., and was named Counselor's 2025 Sustainability Advocate of the Year.
Noah Helman
Noah Helman is the co-founder and CEO of Industrial Microbes (iMicrobes), an Alameda, California synthetic biology company that engineers the central metabolism of microbes so they can eat cheap, renewable feedstocks - ethanol and methane - and spit out the chemicals normally pumped from petroleum. A Stanford applied-physics PhD who spent roughly a decade in physics labs before crossing into biology, Helman co-founded the company in 2014 with two fellow alumni of the biofuels startup LS9. iMicrobes targets drop-in, cost-competitive, net-zero versions of acrylic acid (for paints and adhesives) and acrylonitrile (for carbon fiber). The company went through Y Combinator's W15 batch, holds more than 20 patents, raised a $10M+ seed round in late 2024, and in 2025 announced it had scaled production of 100% bio-based, high-purity acrylic acid.
Phantila Phataraprasit
Phantila Phataraprasit is the co-founder and CEO of Sabai Design, a direct-to-consumer sustainable furniture company she launched in 2019 with Caitlin Ellen. Raised in Bangkok around her mother's eco-lodges and trained as a lawyer at NYU, she set out to prove that earth-friendly furniture could also be affordable. Sabai builds made-to-order sofas from recycled fabrics and FSC-certified wood, ships them plastic-free, and pioneered the first closed-loop furniture program in the U.S. - work that earned a Fast Company World Changing Ideas award and made Phantila the youngest member of the Sustainable Furnishings Council board.
Taylor Zehren
Taylor Zehren is the co-founder and CEO of Wasted* PBC, a Vermont public benefit corporation building the circular sanitation economy by turning human waste into fertilizer. A biochemist and public health researcher turned climate entrepreneur, she leads a company that operates hundreds of urine-diverting toilets across New England and sells WeeBloom, a powdered fertilizer derived from human urine. She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Impact list in 2023 and has raised over $7.5M for the venture.
Vanessa Coleman
Vanessa Coleman is the co-founder and CEO of Oceanworks, the largest global marketplace for recycled plastic materials and products. A serial entrepreneur with an MIT engineering and Sloan MBA background, she has turned mismanaged ocean-bound plastic into a traceable, brand-grade supply chain. Before Oceanworks she was founding CEO of power-electronics company FINsix and co-founded the clean-water social enterprise Saha Global. Her work connects hundreds of brands to vetted regional recyclers, backed by the Oceanworks Guaranteed certification and shore-to-shelf traceability.
Allison Lee
Allison Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Revive, a New York fashion-tech company that helps brands recover value from returned and unsellable inventory through AI-driven inspection, refurbishment, and resale. A Korean immigrant who arrived in the U.S. at 13 and studied psychology at UC Berkeley, she first built Hemster, a SaaS tailoring platform, in 2017. When the pandemic stalled in-store tailoring, she pivoted the underlying fit-data infrastructure into Revive, which she has grown 46x in under a year and which has processed roughly $23M in merchandise. She is a 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
Brian Bauer
Brian Bauer is the co-founder, president, and CEO of Resynergi, a Rohnert Park, California advanced-recycling company turning hard-to-recycle plastic into fuel and chemical feedstock with Continuous Microwave Assisted Pyrolysis (CMAP). A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer who spent 25 years in telecom and semiconductors, Bauer co-founded Resynergi in 2015 with longtime colleague Jason Tanne after a decade of conversations about green technology. His pitch: microwaves heat plastic roughly 10-20 times faster than conventional pyrolysis, in a modular system small enough to deploy near the waste itself. In 2025, a partnership with Lummus Technology brought Resynergi's modules to commercial availability.
Graham Rihn
Graham Rihn is the founder and CEO of RoadRunner, a Pittsburgh-based company that uses data and AI to modernize commercial waste and recycling. A Cornell economics grad and former college linebacker who grew up in Allison Park, Pennsylvania, Rihn started RoadRunner in New York City in 2014 after watching garbage pile up on Manhattan streets and asking why an $85 billion industry had skipped the technology revolution. He moved the company to his hometown of Pittsburgh in 2017 and grew it from roughly 30 people in three cities to more than 500 employees serving over 12,000 customers nationwide, raising more than $150 million along the way, including a $70 million Series D led by General Atlantic.
Suvi Sharma
Suvi Sharma is the co-founder and CEO of SOLARCYCLE, a clean-energy company turning end-of-life solar panels into recovered materials and brand-new solar glass. A three-time solar entrepreneur, he previously built and ran Solaria for 17 years and co-founded Nextracker before it was acquired by Flex. Today he is building one of the first US solar glass plants in Cedartown, Georgia, betting that the fastest-growing source of electricity also needs the smartest plan for what happens when the panels come down.
Manika Doshi
Manika Doshi is the CEO of rePurpose Global, the New York-based plastic action platform that has pulled 100 million pounds of plastic waste out of nature across 11 countries and partnered with 500+ brands. A materials science engineer turned operator, she rose from COO to chief executive in January 2026 as the company pivots toward packaging-compliance software and Extended Producer Responsibility. Her brief: make a tangled, regulation-heavy problem simple enough that brands move from intention to action at scale.
Miranda Wang
Miranda Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Novoloop, a climate-tech materials company turning hard-to-recycle polyethylene waste into virgin-quality performance plastics. She started the venture as a Vancouver high-schooler after a field trip to a waste transfer station, gave a TED talk at 19, and has since built a chemical-upcycling process (ATOD) into a commercial-scale operation, earning the Rolex Award for Enterprise, a UN Young Champions of the Earth honor and the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award along the way.
Philip Stanger
Philip Stanger is the co-founder and CEO of Olyns, a Silicon Valley startup turning recycling into a self-funding business by pairing AI-powered reverse vending 'Cubes' with retail media advertising. A classically trained musician with degrees from Johns Hopkins and Yale, he scored films before founding indoor-positioning startup Wifarer, then led Apple Maps' indoor mapping team for five years. He started Olyns in 2019 after watching wildfires and floods hit the Santa Cruz Mountains where he lives, betting that recycling fails not for lack of technology but because its business model is broken.
Hana Kajimura
Hana Kajimura is the CEO of Trellis Group, the climate media-and-events company behind GreenBiz, Circularity and Trellis Impact. Before running the room, she built it: as Allbirds' first full-time sustainability hire she stamped a carbon footprint on every shoe, open-sourced the methodology so rival brands could copy it, and authored the 'Flight Plan' to halve the company's per-product emissions. A Stanford environmental scientist who chose business over activism because companies 'move much more swiftly,' she now runs the largest gathering of sustainability professionals in North America.