Bill Shireman

Cultivating understanding and, ultimately, mutual support between interests that view one another with suspicion, confusion, or anger: corporations, activists, conservatives, and progressives.

Bill Shireman is a serial social entrepreneur, policy innovator, and conflict mediator who brings together capitalists, activists, conservatives, progressives, and other unusual bedfellows to overcome the challenges that often divide them. As CEO and President of Solution Citizen, Bill helps donors, companies, causes, and campaigns advance pragmatic solutions to climate change and other intractable wedge issues. As Co-Curator of EarthX, the annual conference in Dallas, Bill brings together the world’s foremost environmentalists, conservationists, scientists, political thought leaders, advocates, and academics in the environmental space to bridge perspectives, leverage expertise, and foster multi-partisan collaboration that drives progress for our planet. As President and Founder of the non-profit Future 500, he invited Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network (RAN), ExxonMobil, Mitsubishi and other corporate and environmental leaders to work together to create the world’s first corporate supply chain standards for sustainable forestry. A lifelong climate advocate, Bill was integral to the design and passing of the California “bottle bill”. This legislation brought together an unlikely coalition in the form of Coors, Safeway and the Sierra Club. With his guidance, they created the country’s most cost-effective recycling law by EPA and academic studies. Since enacted in 1987, more than 362 billion beverage containers have been recycled, including more than 10 million tons of aluminum, glass and plastic containers.