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Marian Chertow is a professor of industrial environmental management at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and is also appointed at the Yale School of Management and the National University of Singapore. Her research and teaching focus on industrial ecology, business/environment issues, circular economy, waste management, and urban sustainability.

Her research has championed the study of industrial symbiosis involving geographically based exchanges of materials, energy, water and wastes within networks of businesses globally. She also has carried out many studies of industrial ecology in China, India, and other emerging market countries as a way to value environmental benefits alongside economic ones.

Chertow arrived at Yale F&ES in 1990 after spending many years in government, including a stint as president of the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority. In that role, she helped develop a roughly $1 billion waste infrastructure system for the state. (At the time, the New Haven Advocate referred to Chertow as the state’s “garbage guru.”) In 1991, she was appointed director of the School’s Industrial Environmental Management Program, and she initiated and led the Corporate Environmental Leadership Seminar, a two-week executive training course.

At Yale, her teaching and research have focused on waste management, innovations in environmental technology, and the field of industrial ecology. She also earned her Ph.D., in 2000, writing a final dissertation on the commercialization of environmental technology in the U.S. “I realized that if we want to save the world, and make it less polluted, we need to accelerate the commercialization of these technologies,” Chertow says.

During a trip to Denmark in the late 1990s, she saw firsthand the concept known as industrial symbiosis — which includes the exchange of wastes, materials, energy, and water within networks of businesses to add value, reduce costs, and improve environmental outcomes. Specifically, she encountered a cluster of companies that had found a way to utilize each other’s byproducts to meet their own production needs more efficiently — and even create opportunities for new businesses. The experience would inspire the next phase of her career.

In the years since, she has become a central player in the field, forging relationships with researchers and business leaders worldwide and writing seminal papers about how symbiotic systems can achieve resource and energy savings in many countries, including China and India. Prior to Yale, Professor Chertow spent 10 years in environmental business and state and local government including service as president of a bonding authority that built $1 billion worth of waste infrastructure. She is a frequent international lecturer, serves on the External Advisory Board of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Sustainability at Ingersoll Rand, the Board of Directors of Terracycle US Inc, and the Board of the Alliance for Research in Corporate Sustainability (ARCS).