Chief Executive, Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3)

Policy Fellow Alumnus, Centre for Science and Policy

Dr Colin Church is the Chief Executive of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, the global network for the materials cycle. He is Chair of the Circular Economy Task Force, a business led group convened by Green Alliance that aims to lead policy discussions with ambitious business thinking. He is a Trustee of CHEM Trust and a Board Member of the Society for the Environment, the Materials Processing Institute, and the Federation of European Materials Societies. Colin is also a member of various industry-academia advisory bodies and of the UK Department for Business and Trade’s Critical Imports Council. He is a Fellow of IOM3, a Chartered Environmentalist and a Chartered Resource and Waste Manager. In 2021-2 he chaired the independent review of the role of incineration in the waste hierarchy in Scotland; in 2023 he was the vice-chair of the Task & Finish Group on Critical Minerals Resilience for the UK Government.

Previously, Colin was the CEO of CIWM, the professional body for resources and waste management. Before that, he spent 21 years in the UK Civil Service working in a range of areas including climate change, the theory and practice of regulation, and environmental protection including resource and waste management. He was also a non-executive director of WRAP, the waste reduction and resource efficiency body and the Carbon Trust, the carbon reduction body.