Mimi Wu – Keynote Speaker

Mimi founded one of the world’s only post-consumer plastic bag recycling companies in a country – Myanmar – which consistently ranks in the top 20 hardest countries in the world to conduct business. Her company successfully diverted 4 million pounds (1,800 metric tons) of plastic waste from waterways over 3 years.

Mimi is an impact-driven founder, Board Member, consultant, and advisor with deep operational expertise in global plastics waste management, circularity technologies, and infrastructure systems. She has intimate experience working in the Global South, having lived in Myanmar and Uganda for 11 years.

Mimi’s on-the-ground experience not only founding and operating Myanmar Recycles but also spending hours in open pit dumpsites and working with waste collectors lends authority to her deep understanding of the challenges that most of the world faces when tackling plastic production, reduction, and management. She takes an uncommon view compared to the “West” that unlocking our global green transition requires investing in the Global South’s infrastructure and hardware technology.

Since returning to the US in 2021 after Myanmar’s military coup, Mimi has been working with industry leaders, startups, and VCs on projects that implement waste collection systems and sortation facilities in Southeast Asia, global supply chain traceability, river cleanup and mangroves re-wilding, and advanced recycling solutions for hard-to-recycle plastics. She is Secretariat of the Innovators Alliance for a Global Plastics Treaty, a coalition of SME implementers and technologists driving critical solutions to solve our plastic pollution crisis.