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Adam Minter is an American writer and journalist based in China and the US, and is Shanghai correspondent for Bloomberg World View.Ìý Adam has covered the global recycling industry for more than a decade, and his first book is Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade.Ìý He believes that Western recycling should be allowed to flow to where it is needed most; if China didn't import these resources, it would have to dig and drill for them.Ìý He says even the worst, dirtiest recycling is still better than the very best clear-cut forest or the most up-to-date open-pit mine.

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Dr Angela Murray is a chemical engineer, and a Knowledge Transfer Fellow in the School of Biosciences at Birmingham University, in the UK.ÌýÌý She was BBSRC Enterprise Fellow 2009-2010, for her university spin out company Roads to Riches. The company uses bacteria to convert platinum group metals lost from cars’ catalytic converters back into usable industrial catalyst. The company’s innovative methods apply new technology to traditional methods of concentrating valuable metals in order to retrieve the metals from road dust.ÌýÌý

Professor Alison Lewis is Professor and Head of Department in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cape Town.Ìý She believes acid mine drainage is an environmental disaster in South Africa, and that existing water treatment technologies have reached their limits.ÌýÌý She and her colleagues have developed a new technique called Eutectic Freeze Crystallization, which can freeze contaminated water down to the eutectic point, and recover both the water (as ice) and the contaminants (as pure, usable salts).