Category: Newsletter

Hi! I’m Eli Forrester, and I’ve spent more than a decade keeping products and materials at their highest and best use. I’m from San Francisco and work as the Sustainability Program Manager at Recology, leading the sustainability strategy for an employee-owned company that recycles and composts 1.5 million tons of material a year. Previously, at Steelcase, a century-old furniture company, I built the circular economy programs in reuse, remanufacturing, and reverse logistics that became Circular by Steelcase, the company’s end-of-use program to reuse, repair, remake, and recycle furniture.

From 2021 to 2024, I served on the University of Michigan President’s Sustainability Advisory Board, advising campus leadership on dozens of projects including expanded food recovery and composting at dining facilities serving 15,000 students daily. Earlier, as a policy director at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, I worked with state agencies on zero-waste legislation.

I’m a founding member of NCRA’s Reuse & Repair Committee because reuse must come before recycling. As a Board Member, I will help grow it from a new committee into a lasting NCRA program. I’ll push to close the organics and recycling access gap in multifamily, low-income, and multilingual communities. And I’ll help plan tours and Recycling Update sessions that advance NCRA’s mission to End Waste. I’d be honored to have your vote.

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I would be honored to serve on the NCRA Board. I’m the founder of EarthSort, an app that tells residents which bin an item goes in under their city’s rules. I also bring board experience, serving on the Board of Angel Flight West and as Treasurer of the Schoellkopf Foundation.

My love of the environment started early. From age 10 into my twenties, I spent summers in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where my mother ran a tented safari business. With no electricity and no store, we fixed and adapted whatever we had.

For most of my career I led data divisions in banking, including more than 20 years at First Republic Bank, turning messy information into decisions people could trust. EarthSort puts those same skills to work on waste.

Over the past two years I’ve attended conferences across California and Oregon and talked with waste leaders about information gaps and resident education. This year I attended NCRA’s Recycling Update and Advocacy Day, and joined the Reuse & Repair Committee.

As SB 54, SB 707 and other new rules roll out, residents will be asked to change how they recycle, reuse and discard what they own. On the board, I want to help make those changes easy to understand and act on, bringing my technical and leadership experience to NCRA.

I’d be grateful for your vote.

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