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Since September 2019, Louise Coffineau is Policy Adviser for Environment and Climate at Eurocities. She leads Eurocities’ advocacy activities in the fields of climate and environment.

Louise supports the work of the Eurocities Working Group on Waste (including circular economy), the Working Group on Water and the Eurocities Taskforce on Climate Strategy. Louise represents Eurocities in the Urban Agenda Partnership for Circular Economy and in the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform. She also coordinates Eurocities’ response to the European Green Deal. Previously, as part of the EU Affairs department of EIT InnoEnergy, Louise was in charge of monitoring, advising and supporting the company and its assets regarding EU legislation in energy, innovation and decarbonisation policies, on top of managing different EU contracts.

Louise provides trainings and courses on EU Affairs and lobbying. Prior to joining EIT InnoEnergy, Louise has worked at the Secretariat General of the European Parliament on the negotiations on the ban of plastic bags and on the GMOs Directive, and at the French Permanent Representation in the legal department. Louise graduated from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (IEP) de Lille in European Affairs (2009-2014) and from the College of Europe (2013-2014) in EU Political Studies.

Mette Skovgaard (F), Senior Consultant, the Technical and Environmental Administration, is an expert in circular economy and waste management policies with many years of experience from the EEA’s European Topic Centre on Resource and Waste Management, the Danish Environmental Protection Agency, consultancies and municipal administration.

Mette is the project coordinator for the Horizon 2020 projects, Circular Construction In Regenerative Cities (CIRCuIT) and Cities Cooperating for Circular Economy (FORCE), and before that she managed the LIFE+ project Plastic Zero. Mette is also a member of Eurocities’ Working Group on Waste and its Task Force on Circular Economy. Mette has more than 20 years of professional experience within European and Danish waste management, sustainable development and circular economy. Mette holds a master degree in economics.

Savvas Verdis is a Senior Research Fellow at LSE Cities, the Co-director of the Executive Masters in Cities and the founder of Challenge Circles. He has been teaching at LSE for nearly 20 years. Until recently he was Director of Infrastructure Economics at Siemens Cities.

At LSE, he manages the Executive Education programmes, which include: tailored learning experiences for organisations; the Executive Summer School programme on London and Global Cities; and the Executive MSc in Cities.

He previously worked in the advisory service of LSE Cities and led the research of the ninth Urban Age conference in Rio de Janeiro. He has consulted numerous city and national governments on their infrastructure strategies in countries such as Australia, Brazil, Ethiopia, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and Turkey. From 2009 to 2012, he was founder and CEO of Property Analytics, an algorithm-based property rating website that ranked residential properties in London and New York. He received his PhD from Cambridge University in 2007.

Yanik Moldt holds a master’s degree in Environmental Engineering from the Technical University Berlin.

His research focuses on waste management and circular economy as well as on sustainable engineering.

Since August 2018, Yanik works as Project Manager and Work Package Leader in the Horizon 2020 Project “FORCE: Cities Engaging for Circular Economy”. Before joining SRH, Yanik worked for the German dual system Reclay Group in Cologne and focussed on consulting services in the field of eco-design and recyclability of packaging.

In cooperation with Reclay he prepared his master thesis with the objective to investigate and compare strategies for dual systems to comply with the new packaging law entering into force in 2019.

Furthermore, Yanik worked as an assistant in an international cooperation project by GIZ between the German and Dominican Government with the aim to develop climate compatible development strategies in the waste and cement sector

Consist ITU Environmental Software GmbH – Consist ITU for short – specializes in Europe-wide IT solutions for waste management. As certified degreed engineer for environmental engineering, specialism waste management, Ute Müller is negotiating between the technical, environmental demands and their representation in IT systems. Knowing the business processes is the most important step to a truly usable application. For more than 30 years, she and her team have been successfully implementing IT projects in the waste management sector for government agencies and companies.

In FORCE Consist ITU developed the platform www.CYCEL.de by using Big Data technology.

Laura Robert earned her master’s degree in Georesources Management with a specialization in environmental management at the RWTH Aachen University. Her master’s thesis investigated increasing resource efficiency and environmental protection for the recycling of small electronic household appliances.

Laura Robert has been working as CLP and REACH coordinator and environmental manager in the department of Corporate Environmental Protection at Aurubis since April 2018. Her responsibilities include a group wide harmonization of environmental KPIs, the coordination of external verification as well as environmental reporting. In her function as CLP and REACH coordinator, Laura Robert represents the company in working groups at the national and international level.

Moreover, Laura Robert is project manager of the EU project FORCE (HORIZON 2020) at Aurubis since 2018.

She spent most of her career in Amiu, provider of waste management and circular economy services of the City of Genoa (Italy), in the information and communication dept., integrating technical environmental and communication skills.

From 2013 until 2017 she has been in charge of the Eu funded projects Area, managing projects in which Amiu is partner or stakeholder. In 2015, according to the new industrial plan, the Eu projects were incorporated in Amiu Smart Lab, the newly created unit for R&D and eco-innovation projects.

She has been also member of the internaldevelopment team of the new municipal waste collection plan on a participatory base.

From 2017 until 2020 she worked in the Lanfill management Area contributing with her technical skills, before joining recently AMIU’s Energy Management team.

Hamburg (Senate Chancellery) holds an engineering degree in Urban Development with an extensive knowledge in regional and economic aspects of urban development and functional demands of administrations when implementing new international projects and concepts. Since years he fosters international relations. Years of experience have made him an expert in implementing national, EU (Interreg, FP7, H2020) and further international projects that involve a wide range of partners from other countries as well as in cross-departmental coordination and collaboration in several fields. Consequently, he supports cities in aggregating professional contents into political decision formats; both activities are his central role in all projects. He was also appointed as Hamburg’s “City Science Officer” for knowledge transfer in collaboration with the EU-COM (JRC) – Joint Research Centre (GD R&I).

In FORCE he played a central role in the Hamburg government to structure and apply project activities, link to relevant stakeholders and create new local, regional and international relations.

Donald Alimi (MSc) is Research Associate at the department of Urban Planning and Regional Development at HafenCity University Hamburg (HCU-UPRD). He graduated in urban planning with a major focus on sustainability concepts and policy-making at the Polytechnic University of Milan. His interests and research focus are on the governance of climate change mitigation and circular economy as part of different European projects at the HCU-UPRD. As part of the FORCE project, he has been the lead of WP7 “Governance and Decision-Support” since 2018.

Ivonne Stresius is a state certified food chemist and an environmental engineer. For many years she has worked as a scientist, project manager and lecturer in international research for environmental quality and sustainability at different universities and as a consultant for water quality and environmental protection. Her current work at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg includes coordination and management of projects about circular economy and water management. In the FORCE project she was responsible for a cross cutting work package about exploitation and dissemination of the project results.

Degree in Environmental Engineering at Genoa University, Specialization in Environmental Engineering. Expert waste management, separate waste collection patterns, public environmental services. Employed by the Municipality of Genoa since 1999, appointed to environmental department. In charge of developing plans of reduction of waste production, agenda for the implementation of separate collection, georeferencing of illegal dumping (Gedi @ b project) and related restoration and management interventions assignments pursuant to the Law and subsequent amendments, drafting provisions pursuant to Legislative Decree 152/2006 and subsequent amendments. Also, involved as technical support for environmental topics in European projects related to energy and waste management.