Ellen Struthers

Expertise

Circularity & Waste

Ellen has worked on recycling and waste topics for around 25 years, delivering projects that increase circularity of resources around the world with a particular focus on collection, sorting and onward routes for materials.

She has worked extensively with both the private and public sectors to develop, improve and measure waste and recycling services. This includes advising on the development of take-back systems for hard-to-recycle products and packaging, undertaking recyclability assessments and exploring opportunities for materials to be collected and sorted in mainstream household and commercial collection services.

She regularly leads landscape reviews and market assessments, which help multinational clients understand how regulation and waste and recycling infrastructure influence the fate of material within different countries, helping them to develop strategies, plan interventions, identify partnerships and support the case for investment in change.  Ellen also helps clients to measure their upstream and downstream waste footprints and oversees waste audits and on-site waste assessments, identifying priority areas for action to reduce the impact and cost of waste.

Project examples include assessing upstream supply chain waste for Amazon to highlight waste hotspots and opportunities for change, leading the development of assumptions about the fate of plastic waste globally for WWF and tracking formal and informal plastic recycling routes in India and Southeast Asia to provide a view of the availability of post-consumer polymers and to inform policy interventions and investment.