Julie Hill

Julie Hill is former Director of, and now an Associate of, Green Alliance – one of the UK’s foremost environmental policy organisations.  She has worked on environmental policy for over twenty-five years. Her areas of particular expertise are waste & resources policy, biotechnology and sustainable buildings, but she also has a detailed understanding of the history and current status of most aspects of the sustainability agenda.  She has recently finished terms as as Non-executive Director of the Environment Agency for England and Wales, and of the Eden Project in Cornwall.

With an academic background in English, philosophy, politics and ecology, Julie has held a number of senior advisory posts in government and in commercial organisations.  These include a total of fifteen years on government regulatory and advisory committees governing Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), one of the first representatives of a non-governmental organisation to take such a role.  This involvement culminated in four years as Deputy Chair of the Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC), where she was responsible for the implementation of innovative approaches to public and stakeholder engagement.  

She has contributed to a number of significant pamphlets and academic papers on the potential environmental risks from GMOs, public attitudes to biotechnology, and approaches to handling risk and uncertainty in policy-making.

Julie is also one of the few expert commentators on waste and resources policy in the NGO sector, and as such has been closely involved in government policy development in this field.  She has a detailed understanding of waste practices and policy from a combination of fifteen years experience on the advisory board to a major waste company, together with collaborative working with leading companies under Green Alliance’s ‘Closing the Loop’ and ‘Designing out Waste’ programmes. She is currently Chair of the Circular Economy Task Force, a Green Alliance initiative involving eight leading companies and supported by Defra and BIS.

She has authored and co-authored many publications on business and the environment, biotechnology and waste policy including a well-received book ‘The Secret Life of Stuff’ (Vintage, 2011) and the influential reports ‘Reinventing the Wheel’ (Green Alliance 2011) and ‘A Zero Waste UK’ (IPPR 2006).