Ben Rump

WORK HISTORY

ABOUT BEN RUMP

I turn complex material systems into circular ones — not as a concept, but at industrial scale. Over 20 years, I have worked at the intersection of chemistry, procurement, and sustainability across Bayer, Lanxess, HELM, and most recently as COO of matterr GmbH, where I co-led the development of a chemical PET depolymerisation plant in Germany — converting hard-to-recycle textile and packaging waste back into virgin-quality monomers at commercial scale. Before that, I spent three years building the global market for QIRA (bio-based 1,4-BDO), recognised by TIME as one of the Best Innovations of 2025. And before that, I managed over $350 million in global procurement spend for high-performance polymers at Lanxess, with responsibility for raw materials including PTA, PET, PA6/66, and 1,4-BDO. What I bring is rare: the ability to think strategically about material systems while understanding the engineering, procurement, and regulatory reality that makes change actually happen. I am passionate about the circular economy not as a reporting exercise, but as an industrial transformation challenge. I know where the bottlenecks are — in feedstock quality, in process economics, in policy gaps, and in the commercial structures that make or break a business case.