7 YOUNG LEADERS UNDER 30 IN THE GREEN AND CIRCULAR ECONOMY

Visionaries, multidisciplinary experts, and innovators—these young individuals are leading the transition toward a more circular and sustainable system with their ideas. Startuppers, entrepreneurs, managers, and opinion leaders, they work in material recycling, the sharing economy, and environmental protection, moving away from the traditional linear economy model to shape a different future—one that respects the planet and future generations. 


Gianluca Torta, Italy

Gianluca Torta, a 29-year-old chemist, and Enrico Pizzi, a 28-year-old engineer, are the co-founders of RarEarth, an Italian startup founded in 2023 and based in Milan. They won the 2024 edition of "Eni Joule for Entrepreneurship." Their innovation lies in developing a chemical process for efficiently and economically recovering rare earth elements from end-of-life products containing NdFeB (neodymium, iron, and boron) magnets. These products come from sectors such as consumer electronics, sensors, and electric motors. Their goal is to establish a European internal source for these critical materials. The result? Recycled permanent magnets with unique characteristics, high quality, and a wide range of applications. 






Olimpia Santella, Italy

Olimpia Santella, 26, together with Chiara Airoldi, 27, founded Cloov, a Milan-based fashion-tech startup launched in June 2022. Both entrepreneurs were featured in Forbes Under 30 Italy. Their idea is to help fashion brands rethink the way they manage unsold, returned, or out-of-season inventory. Instead of resorting to discounts, costly disposal, or complex recycling processes, brands can adopt circular models like resale, rental, and repair. Their software provides businesses with a white-label platform to launch fully customized second-hand and rental re-commerce solutions. 






Raffaele Nacchiero, Italy

Raffaele Nacchiero, 25, from Puglia, Italy, won the 2023 National Innovation Award – "Premio dei Premi." He is the co-founder and CEO of AraBat, an innovative startup focused on recycling spent batteries and recovering precious metals. How? By using organic acids and biological waste—primarily orange peels—in its processing. This sustainable chemical treatment extracts lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, and other raw materials, which can be reused for new battery production or introduced into industries such as metallurgy, shipbuilding, and construction. 







Vishal Tolambia, India

Vishal Tolambia, 27, is an award-winning multidisciplinary designer and a global ambassador for ethical and sustainable fashion practices. Driven by a desire to reshape the fashion industry through circular recycling, he founded Humanity-Centred Designs, a material innovation hub that transforms pre-consumer textile waste from companies into HCD-Tex™—a 100% recycled, highly flexible, durable, and low-impact fabric. So far, over 150 marginalized micro-enterprises in India have been involved in the process. 







Dylan Lew, USA

At 26, Dylan Lew, a Forbes Under 30 USA honoree, co-founded Ecotone Renewables with Kyle Wyche and Elliott Bennett. Their goal is to make sustainable food and agricultural systems more accessible beyond the industrial scale. Their patented Zero Emission Upcycling Systems (ZEUS) removes plastics, metals, and glass from food waste collected from sources like universities, hospitals, and restaurants (about 10 tons annually). ZEUS then efficiently converts the waste into Soil Sauce, an organic liquid fertilizer. Around 10,000 liters are produced yearly and distributed to local communities. 






Nicoline Good, USA

Nicoline Good, 28, is a Corporate Sustainability Associate at BlackRock, reporting to the Global Head of Sustainability. As part of her role in managing emissions reductions, she developed the company's 2023 guidelines for carbon credits and sustainable aviation fuel credits while also recruiting a new ESG data controller team. Named among GreenBiz 30 Under 30 in 2024, she specializes in corporate sustainability and climate programs. Before joining BlackRock, she worked at ERM, an environmental consulting firm, where she helped over 20 companies measure and manage more than 300 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions. 





Boyan Slat, The Netherlands

Boyan Slat, born in 1994, is a Dutch inventor and entrepreneur who founded The Ocean Cleanup in 2013. This nonprofit organization develops and scales technologies to rid the oceans of plastic. Their twofold strategy involves removing existing ocean plastic pollution and preventing new plastic from reaching the oceans via Interceptor™ river-cleaning solutions. By August 2024, The Ocean Cleanup had removed over 16 million kilograms of waste from aquatic ecosystems worldwide. The organization, with a multidisciplinary team of about 140 people, is headquartered in Rotterdam, Netherlands, with an additional office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 





Article written by Emanuele Bompan and Maria Carla Rota