Bill Shireman is an entrepreneur, environmental policy leader, and civic innovator who has spent more than four decades bringing people together across political divides to solve difficult problems. His career has focused on a simple idea: Good policy should strengthen both the economy and the environment.

As CEO and President of Solution Citizen, Bill helps donors, companies, causes, and campaigns advance pragmatic solutions to climate change, plastic waste, and other intractable wedge issues.

As President and Founder of the non-profit Future 500, he invited corporate and environmental leaders to work together to create the world’s first corporate supply chain standards for sustainable forestry (between Mitsubishi, Rainforest Action Network, and then 400 other companies), the most effective beverage container recycling program (the California CRV deposit system and its progeny), and the 2008 agreement by both Greenpeace and ExxonMobil to separately support precisely the same federal tax on carbon.

Bill has been a lifelong climate advocate and helped build California’s modern recycling system through his work with Californians Against Waste, helping design California’s “bottle bill”. This legislation brought together an unlikely coalition in the form of Coors, Safeway and the Sierra Club. With his guidance, they created the country’s most cost-effective recycling law by EPA and academic studies. Since enacted in 1987, more than 362 billion beverage containers have been recycled, including more than 10 million tons of aluminum, glass and plastic containers 

So others can take up where he eventually leaves off, he has taught leadership and negotiations at the UC Berkeley Haas Business School, and serves as chairman and a surrogate founding father of BridgeUSA, where young progressives, conservatives, libertarians, and independents all register decline-to-hate, and engage in democracy by listening, speaking, learning, teaching, and then solving problems together.

Professor Shireman is the author of 7 books. His latest, “In This Together: How Republicans, Democrats, Capitalists, and Activists are uniting to tackle climate change and more”, can be found on Amazon and in leading bookstores.