plastic-waste
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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.
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.