Carlos Silva Filho is a Brazilian lawyer specialising in Administrative & Economic Law, who started working in the waste industry in 1999 as legal advisor at ABRELPE – Brazilian Association of Waste Management Companies, ISWA National Member in Brazil. In 2008 he became ABRELPE’s Executive Director and in 2012 its President. Mr. Silva Filho has been dedicated to developing waste related Regulations, Waste Plans, Communication Strategies and Data research and analysis.

Mr. Silva Filho has been a member of ISWA since 2005. In 2011 he became a member of the ISWA board, was elected Vice-President in 2014 and in 2015 he cofounded and chaired the ISWA Young Professionals Group. In 2020 Mr. Silva Filho has been nominated and elected as ISWA President.

Wendy de Wild (1975) has been director of the Dutch Association for Municipal Waste since 2020. She has been committed to planet and people ever since she was a teenager, so contributing to a circular economy truly feels like her cup of tea. Previously among other things she served as a regional director with ProRail, the national rail infrastructure manager. She has also managed the department of stakeholdermanagement and public affairs for several years. Her educational background varies from a bachelor in business administration & hotelmanagement, a Master in PR & Advertising at Florida International and a bachelor in political science. She has been interested in the combination of governance of public executive institutions and political decisionmaking, whether it be public transportation or municipal waste. “We are ambitious in our achievements, though pragmatic when necessary. We embrace our share in the future circular economy, and add value by delivering on a daily basis instead of just talking. We develop knowledge together with our members and show leadership in order to accelerate the transition towards circulating products and materials at their highest value. Then again, our members also ‘just’ keep cities and communities clean and waste-free night and day, employing 29.000 people.”

Dr. Anne Scheinberg has a lifelong professional commitment to inclusive recycling, sustainable materials cycles, and healthy cities. She was one of the North American recycling pioneers who invented municipal recycling in the USA and Canada in the 1980s, and since 2000 has focused on Integrated Sustainable Waste Management (ISWM) planning and implementation in more than 40 countries in all parts of the world.

She works with and for informal recyclers in emerging economies — especially in SouthEastern Europe — so that their good work is recognised and appreciated by local and national authorities. 

Currently Scheinberg spilts her time between process facilitation and renewal in governance, research on waste prevention, and on improving recycling rates in a post-China-Sword era. She  chairs the Working Group on Recycling and Waste Minimization of the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) and in that capacity is leading the Circular and Low Carbon Cities (CALC) project, working on metrics for waste prevention and developing indicators for cities to score and improve circularity and decrease CO2 emissions. 

Paul Lucas is integrated assessment modeler and project leader ‘Sustainable development Goals and Planetary Boundaries’ at PBL. He is part of the IMAGE Integrated Assessment Modelling team, working on the link between global environmental change and human development. The SDG project supports national and international implementation of the SDGs. Main clients include various ministries within the Dutch Government, the EU and UNEP.

His research centers around integrated assessment of achieving long-term sustainability targets and translation of global environmental challenges and agreements to the national level, with a specific focus on the environmental dimension of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In recent work he looked into national SDG implementation, scaling Planetary Boundaries to the national level and global scenarios for achieving environment-related SDGs.

Paul is a member of the Planetary Boundaries research network (PB-net), contributed to the Global Monitoring Report series of the World Bank and was involved as a lead author for UNEP’s fifth Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-5) and as Coordinating Lead Author for UNEP’s GEO-6. Furthermore, he has written various scientific articles, addressing climate policy, energy dynamics, SDG implementation and operationalization of planetary boundaries.

Larissa is a passionate sustainability professional. She works at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, on advancing sustainability together with business. She has experience with various circularity and sustainability assessment methodologies. She loves to develop credible sustainability measurement that brings us closer to our goals.

Dr Costas Velis (BSc MSc DIC PhD MInstP MCIWM) is an international expert on circular economy and resource recovery from waste. An academic at the School of Civil Engineering, University of Leeds, in the UK, he coordinates across the University a cross-disciplinary network on Circular Economy & Resource Recovery (CERRY), and manages a solid waste characterization laboratory. Dr Velis was recently appointed as Chair in the new ISWA Marine Litter Task Force, aiming at establishing the clear link between sound waste and resource management practices and the prevention of marine litter global challenge.

He leads a research team with the vision of using wastes to close material loops and accommodate for our energy needs, in environmentally sound clean material flows, while maximizing the overall benefits to society. His expertise covers topics from informal sector recycling in the Global South, to the production and quality assurance of solid recovered fuels (SRF), to holistic systems assessment such as circular economy for waste plastics.

A Chartered Waste Manager by CIWM, and registered with the Institute of Physics (MInstP), with over 13 years of work and research experience in innovation for waste and resources management, he serves in many international committees and initiatives addressing relevant challenges of global scale, including the prestigious seminal Global Waste Management Outlook released by UNEP. He has a very wide research portfolio as PI and Co-I, and has delivered invited lectures around the World.

Dr Velis is Vice Chair of the ISWA European Group; Head of the Waste Atlas Partnership Scientific Committee; and Vice Chair of the Waste to Energy Resource and Technology Council – UK. Published in leading academic journals, and having delivered invited lectures all over the world, he offers to his profession as Associate Editor of the academic journals Waste Management & Research, and Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology. Costas’s academic research papers have been honored with many prestigious Awards, including those from ICE, CIWM and ISWA (Institution of Civil Engineers; The Chartered Institution of Wastes Management; International Solid Waste Association).

Dr Velis holds a PhD in Environmental Engineering from Cranfield University, an MSc in Environmental Engineering and Sustainable Development form Imperial College London, and a BSc in Physics from University of Athens