Elizabeth Jane Goodwin OBE (born 6 June 1961) is a British businesswoman and environmentalist.
She is the Senior fellow and Director of Food Loss and Waste for WRI (World Resources Institute) and also the Chair of ReLondon (formerly London Waste and Recycling Board).
She was previously the CEO of the waste reduction charity, WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) from 2007 to 2016. [1] In 2015, she was recognised in the Queen's Birthday Honours list and received an OBE for her services to business resource efficiency and the environment. [2]
Goodwin was born in June 1961 in London. [3]
Goodwin attended Chichester High School For Girls from 1972 to 1979. After leaving Chichester High School for Girls, she went on to study a BSc in Chemistry at UCL, and following that, completed a PhD in Chemical physics from the University of Exeter. [4] In 2010, Cranfield University honoured Goodwin with an honorary Doctor of Science, in recognition of her achievements in environmental, recycling and resource efficiency issues. [5] The Society for the Environment also elected Goodwin as an Honorary Fellow of the Society for the Environment in December 2013, in recognition to her services to the environment. [6]
Goodwin started her earlier career as a Research Scientist for ICI, before working as an environment manager for Zeneca Agrochemicals, and then Syngenta as an Environmental Advisor. [4]
Goodwin became CEO at WRAP in 2007 having worked for the organisation since its early days, joining in 2001 as the first Director of Materials Programme. [3] After taking over as CEO, she worked to raise the profile of WRAP and the issues of resource efficiency, waste and recycling. [7] The organisation is now focused on helping deliver the economic benefits of a more circular economy. [8]
Under Goodwin's leadership, the Courtauld Commitment, involving major retailers, brands and their supply chains, has been driven forward and reductions in packaging have been achieved despite growth in sales. [9] The problem of food waste is now widely understood and progress is being made in tackling this serious issue, with a 21% reduction in avoidable food waste being reported in late 2013. [10] WRAP continues to work with local authorities and the wider resource management sector to ensure that waste that is recycled where possible. [11]
Along with industry initiatives, two new consumer campaigns, Love Food Hate Waste, and Love Your Clothes, have been launched under Goodwin's leadership, joining WRAP's other consumer campaign, Recycle Now, which aims to increase household recycling. [2]
Goodwin sought to ensure that there was a business case for WRAP's work, which would help ensure longer term viability and sustainability, and ways to deliver economic benefits. [12]
In February 2016 Goodwin announced that she would be stepping down as CEO of WRAP at the end June 2016. [13]
Goodwin joined the World Resources Institute (WRI) in September 2016 as its first Senior Fellow and Director of Food Loss and Waste https://www.wri.org/profile/liz-goodwin. She is also a Champion of the UN sustainable goal 12.3 to halve food waste across the globe by 2030. Her role at WRI is very much to seek to achieve this ambitious target of the UN by engaging all of the Champions throughout the World and bringing about sustainable change in how much food is wasted by producers, throughout the supply chains and by consumers.
During 2021 Goodwin led the work on food loss and waste for the UN Food System Summit that was held in September of that year. This resulted in significant government involvement, around the globe, in achieving the UN Sustainability Development Goal 12.3.
In February 2017, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, appointed Goodwin as the Chair of the London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB) [14] in 2020 the name was changed to ReLondon to better reflect the substance of what the organisation does being the promotion of resource efficiency in London.
Goodwin has been asked by Sadiq Khan to mastermind the achievement of a number of goals by ReLondon including getting the capital on the path to increasing the recycling rate substantially by 2030; creating jobs in reuse, repair, re-manufacturing and materials innovation to support London's transition to the circular economy; and helping London become a net zero-carbon city by 2050.
The appointment of Goodwin was originally confirmed by a hearing of the GLA Confirmations Committee on 20 February 2017 [15] and was reconfirmed by the same committee in August 2020.
Goodwin is married and lives in Oxfordshire. [16]
Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. This concept often includes the recovery of energy from waste materials. The recyclability of a material depends on its ability to reacquire the properties it had in its original state. It is an alternative to "conventional" waste disposal that can save material and help lower greenhouse gas emissions. It can also prevent the waste of potentially useful materials and reduce the consumption of fresh raw materials, reducing energy use, air pollution and water pollution.
Zero waste, or waste minimization, is a set of principles focused on waste prevention that encourages redesigning resource life cycles so that all products are repurposed and/or reused. The goal of the movement is to avoid sending trash to landfills, incinerators, oceans, or any other part of the environment. Currently 9% of global plastic is recycled. In a zero waste system, all materials are reused until the optimum level of consumption is reached.
A sustainable business, or a green business, is an enterprise that has a minimal negative impact or potentially a positive effect on the global or local environment, community, society, or economy—a business that strives to meet the triple bottom line. They cluster under different groupings and the whole is sometimes referred to as "green capitalism." Often, sustainable businesses have progressive environmental and human rights policies. In general, a business is described as green if it matches the following four criteria:
Food miles is the distance food is transported from the time of its making until it reaches the consumer. Food miles are one factor used when testing the environmental impact of food, such as the carbon footprint of the food.
Glass recycling is the processing of waste glass into usable products. Glass that is crushed or imploded and ready to be remelted is called cullet. There are two types of cullet: internal and external. Internal cullet is composed of defective products detected and rejected by a quality control process during the industrial process of glass manufacturing, transition phases of product changes and production offcuts. External cullet is waste glass that has been collected or reprocessed with the purpose of recycling. External cullet is classified as waste. The word "cullet", when used in the context of end-of-waste, will always refer to external cullet.
WRAP is a British registered charity. It works with businesses, individuals and communities to achieve a circular economy, by helping them reduce waste, develop sustainable products and use resources in an efficient way.
Sustainable procurement or green procurement is a process whereby organizations meet their needs for goods, services, works and utilities in a way that achieves value for money on a life-cycle basis while addressing equity principles for sustainable development, therefore benefiting societies and the environment across time and geographies. Procurement is often conducted via a tendering or competitive bidding process. The process is used to ensure the buyer receives goods, services or works for the best possible price, when aspects such as quality, quantity, time, and location are compared. Procurement is considered sustainable when organizations broadens this framework by meeting their needs for goods, services, works, and utilities in a way that achieves value for money and promotes positive outcomes not only for the organization itself but for the economy, environment, and society. This framework is also known as the triple bottom line, which is a business accounting framework. The concept of TBL is narrowly prescribed, and even John Elkington, who coined the term in the 1990s, now advocates its recall. Indeed, procurement practitioners have drawn attention to the fact that buying from smaller firms, locally, is an important aspect of sustainable procurement in the public sector. Ethics, culture, safety, diversity, inclusion, justice, human rights and the environment are additionally listed as important aspects of SPP.
In 2015, 43.5% of the United Kingdom's municipal waste was recycled, composted or broken down by anaerobic digestion. The majority of recycling undertaken in the United Kingdom is done by statutory authorities, although commercial and industrial waste is chiefly processed by private companies. Local Authorities are responsible for the collection of municipal waste and operate contracts which are usually kerbside collection schemes. The Household Waste Recycling Act 2003 required local authorities in England to provide every household with a separate collection of at least two types of recyclable materials by 2010. Recycling policy is devolved to the administrations of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales who set their own targets, but all statistics are reported to Eurostat.
Sustainable fashion is a term describing efforts within the fashion industry to reduce its environmental impacts, protect workers producing garments, and uphold animal welfare. Sustainability in fashion encompasses a wide range of factors, including "cutting CO2 emissions, addressing overproduction, reducing pollution and waste, supporting biodiversity, and ensuring that garment workers are paid a fair wage and have safe working conditions".
The Plastics 2020 Challenge is a campaign to reduce the quantity of plastic waste sent to landfill. In 2009, the plastics industry, PlasticsEurope, the Packaging and Films Association (PAFA) and the British Plastics Federation (BPF), launched its Plastics 2020 Challenge campaign in the UK to challenge itself, consumers and government to step up resource efficiency and stop sending plastic materials to landfill. The Plastics 2020 Challenge was named runner-up "Campaign of the Year" for 2009 by Packaging News.
Environmentally sustainable design is the philosophy of designing physical objects, the built environment, and services to comply with the principles of ecological sustainability and also aimed at improving the health and comfort of occupants in a building. Sustainable design seeks to reduce negative impacts on the environment, the health and well-being of building occupants, thereby improving building performance. The basic objectives of sustainability are to reduce the consumption of non-renewable resources, minimize waste, and create healthy, productive environments.
A circular economy is a model of resource production and consumption in any economy that involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling existing materials and products for as long as possible. The concept aims to tackle global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution by emphasizing the design-based implementation of the three base principles of the model. The three principles required for the transformation to a circular economy are: designing out waste and pollution; keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems." CE is defined in contradistinction to the traditional linear economy. The idea and concepts of a circular economy have been studied extensively in academia, business, and government over the past ten years. It has been gaining popularity because it can help to minimize carbon emissions and the consumption of raw materials, open up new market prospects, and, principally, increase the sustainability of consumption.
Sustainable products are products who are either sustainability sourced, manufactured or processed that provide environmental, social and economic benefits while protecting public health and environment over their whole life cycle, from the extraction of raw materials until the final disposal.
Resource recovery is using wastes as an input material to create valuable products as new outputs. The aim is to reduce the amount of waste generated, thereby reducing the need for landfill space, and optimising the values created from waste. Resource recovery delays the need to use raw materials in the manufacturing process. Materials found in municipal solid waste, construction and demolition waste, commercial waste and industrial wastes can be used to recover resources for the manufacturing of new materials and products. Plastic, paper, aluminium, glass and metal are examples of where value can be found in waste.
Waste management in Russia refers to the legislation, actions and processes pertaining to the management of the various waste types encountered throughout the Russian Federation. The basis of legal governance for waste management in Russia at the federal level is outlined through Federal Law No. 89-FZ, which defines waste as “the remains of raw materials, materials, semi-finished products, other articles or products that have been formed in the process of production or consumption as well as the goods (products) that have lost their consumer properties”.
Resource efficiency is the maximising of the supply of money, materials, staff, and other assets that can be drawn on by a person or organization in order to function effectively, with minimum wasted (natural) resource expenses. It means using the Earth's limited resources in a sustainable manner while minimising environmental impact.
Gypsum recycling is the process of turning gypsum waste into recycled gypsum, thereby generating a raw material that can replace virgin gypsum raw materials in the manufacturing of new products.
Sustainable Materials Management is a systemic approach to using and reusing materials more productively over their entire lifecycles. It represents a change in how a society thinks about the use of natural resources and environmental protection. By looking at a product's entire lifecycle new opportunities can be found to reduce environmental impacts, conserve resources, and reduce costs.
A circular economy is an alternative way countries manage their resources, where instead of using products in the traditional linear make, use, dispose method, resources are used for their maximum utility throughout its life cycle and regenerated in a cyclical pattern minimizing waste. They strive to create economic development through environmental and resource protection. The ideas of a circular economy were officially adopted by China in 2002, when the 16th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party legislated it as a national endeavour, though various sustainability initiatives were implemented in the previous decades starting in 1973. China adopted the circular economy due to the environmental damage and resource depletion that was occurring from going through its industrialization process. China is currently a world leader in the production of resources, where it produces 46% of the worlds aluminum, 50% of steel and 60% of cement, while it has consumed more raw materials than all the countries a part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) combined. In 2014, China created 3.2 billion tonnes of industrial solid waste, where 2 billion tonnes were recovered using recycling, incineration, reusing and composting. By 2025, China is anticipated to produce up to one quarter of the worlds municipal solid waste.
Bas de Leeuw is a Dutch economist and sustainability expert. He is currently Managing Director of the World Resources Forum.
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