circular-economy
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Josh Matthews Is Giving Every Used Device a Memory
The Apkudo co-founder spent years teaching machines to understand phones. Now he is building a record of what every device has been through - and what it should become next.
Zheng Li Is Trying to Keep a Battery’s Most Valuable Secret Intact
After eighteen years in battery research, Zheng Li has arrived at an industrial question: can yesterday’s cathode become tomorrow’s cathode without first being reduced to its cheapest parts? His answer is moving from patents and pilot lines toward a 10,000-ton test of scale.
Tim Brown Is Selling the Afterlife of Your Phone
The Apkudo revenue chief works in the unglamorous, consequential minutes after a phone is returned - when data, trust and a second life are all still up for grabs.
James Kawas Keeps Finding the Work Inside Other People’s Closets
Before Flyp became a toolkit for thousands of resellers, Kawas learned the secondhand trade by trying to sell a PlayStation 3, skipping class to send business emails and building a marketplace in two days.
Steve Adams Is Marketing the Unmarketable: What Happens After the Recycling Bin
The former data-storage executive now has a messier brief: explain a village-scale recycling system clearly enough for communities, operators and investors to picture what happens after the blue bin.
Nick Ramsay Wants Your Next Phone to Have a Second Life
The Circular founder is betting that access can beat ownership - and that a phone passed from one careful user to the next can become a better business, not merely a greener one.
Jeevika Makani Keeps Following the Awkward Little Gap
She went from economic regulation to Nairobi fintech, fashion resale and AI app payments by asking the same practical question: where is useful value getting stuck?
Matias Sjögren Built a Water Company Around Nature’s Unfashionable Workforce
He left a family office after seeing a worm-filled filter at his father’s house. Fifteen years later, BioFiltro is turning that unlikely encounter into water infrastructure financed by long contracts, carbon credits and a $35 million investment.
Nicholas Myers Put $7,000 Into a Backyard Experiment. Now He Is Building America’s Rare-Earth Middle.
A physics graduate with no mining résumé helped turn a backyard reactor into a rare-earth business. His wager is that America’s missing industrial link can be rebuilt with cleaner chemistry, patient capital, and a team willing to learn in public.
Chris Sapyta Saw a Freight Train. Then He Rewired the Keg Business.
A railroad crossing gave Chris Sapyta the boxcar analogy that shaped keg pooling. Three decades later, the Keg Logistics founder is still solving the same stubborn problem: how to keep reusable steel moving without making brewers own every vessel.
Dillon Baxter Bet on a Fork That Could Disappear
A college golfer sold straws door to door, quit banking after one month, lost an $8 million commitment, and kept building. Now PlantSwitch is trying to make the useful life of plastic match the life of the thing it serves.
Sean Petterson Wants Plywood to Meet Its Replacement
After turning a student invention into an acquired industrial-safety company, Sean Petterson chose an older adversary: plywood. His second act is a lesson in selling change to factories that have no patience for disruption.
Alex Min Is Turning Yesterday's Grain Into Tomorrow's Ingredients
A former strategy consultant saw hunger on one trip and edible waste on the next. Now his Seoul company is building the cold chains, factories and demand that can make food byproducts useful again.
Philippe Boulanger Is Selling Steel's Second Life
At ArcelorMittal Long Products Canada, a former plant leader has a marketing problem measured in furnaces, freight and carbon. Philippe Boulanger's answer begins with customers - and with the idea that old steel can become new infrastructure.
Claire Schlemme Found a Business Hiding in the Pulp
A juice-shop waste problem led Claire Schlemme to soybean pulp, industrial drying and a deceptively practical idea: keep good food in the food system by giving overlooked ingredients a second job.
Christelle Rohaut Is Teaching Offices to Run Themselves
The urban planner behind Codi has spent eight years following one stubborn question: why do cities make people and spaces work so hard to find each other? Her answer has evolved from neighborhood desks to software that orders the oat milk.
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.