Biography

I am a Senior Lecturer in Waste and Resource Engineering at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London. Previously I was based University of Leeds. As Principal Investigator I lead a team with core research focus on enabling a sustainable circular economy and on preventing plastics pollution. My research portfolio is spread over the world and covers innovation for closing the materials loop and recovering value for secondary material resources and energy (after-use items, waste) – I pioneered circular economy across the university by setting up the Circular Economy & Resource Recovery (CERRY) network. I conduct interdisciplinary research, funded by UK research bodies (UKRI, NERC, EPSRC, ESCR, British Council, Innovate UK, BBSRC, Royal Academy of Engineering) and international organisations (World Bank Group, OECD, GIZ, UN-Habitat, UNESCAP, The PEW Charitable Trusts, IGES, ISWA, Grid-Arendal, SYSTEMIQ). My research collaboration outputs are in receipt of prestigious international awards, including those from the CIWM James Jacskon Award (2015), the ICE Thomas Telford Award (2014) and twice the ISWA Publication Award (2015 and 2013).

I chair the recently created by the UN Environment Community of Practice (CoP) on Harmonisation of Plastic Pollution Quantification Models and Methodologies, administered by GPML. The last four years (2017-2022) I led the ISWA Task Force on Marine Litter established by the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) to prevent plastics pollution from mismanaged solid waste in the Global South. Recently my research team led or substantially contributed to the development of a suite of models to quantify plastics pollution (P2O, WFD, ISWA Plastic Pollution Calculator, SPOT) and the landmark OECD Global Plastics Outlook. You can access here our plastic pollution research in Science – further explained in The Conversation – and by the BBC News – put in context in University of Leeds Spotlight – with the underlying effort explained in our Plastic-to-Ocean model page.

Published in Nature, Science, Environmental Science & Technology, Journal of Hazardous Materials, and relevant journals, I service the academic community as Editor-in-Chief of Waste Management & Research (2019 onwards), in the Editorial Board of Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology, and was recently appointed as Specialty Chief Editor for Waste Management for Frontiers In Sustainability; by regularly peer-reviewing for e.g. Science, Environmental Science & Technology, Journal of Hazardous Materials, Journal of Cleaner Production, Waste Management, Science of the Total Environment, Habitat International); and via research assessment panels. Being a Chartered Waste Manager and registered with relevant professional bodies (CIWM, Institute of Physics), I also serve as Vice Chair for the Waste to Energy Resource and Technology Council - UK and served as Vice Chair for ISWA European Group.

I was honoured to be a core author team member for the prestigious first Global Waste Management Outlook commissioned by UNEP, chaired the Waste Atlas database Scientific Committee, and having been coordinating member of numerous Task Forces of the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) (e.g. Globalisation and Waste Management; Resources Management), is steering committee member of the CIWM Thermal Treatment Special Interest Group, and member of the ISWA Working Group on Energy Recovery. Recently, I was involved in the ad-hoc group contributing to the protocol for the new SDG 11.6.1 target. Our model SPOT has provided the very first global estimate of this indicator, included in the official 2022 UN SDGs reporting.