Rubicon Leadership Driven by Passion to Put an End to Waste

Rubicon is a software platform with a mission: to end waste.

It provides smart recycling solutions for businesses and governments worldwide. Rubicon helps its partners — haulers, businesses, companies, cities, and municipalities — find economic value in their waste streams and confidently execute on their sustainability goals.

Using technology to drive environmental innovation, the company helps turn businesses into more sustainable enterprises, and neighbourhoods into greener and smarter places to live and work.

Rubicon became a certified B Corp in 2012 and successfully recertified two additional times, receiving higher impact scores each time. B Corporations are changing the way business is conducted by meeting the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose — a perfect fit for a company with a mission to end waste. As a certified Great Place to Work for four consecutive years and as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in 2016 and 2020, its people and products combine to drive positive change in the workplace and the world.

Nate Morris

Rubicon founder and CEO Nate Morris has a passion to solve the environmental threats posed by global waste, an important factor in the founding of Rubicon. Morris realised quickly that the waste and recycling industry was in need of disruption. Morris began work on a better way, and  Rubicon became a catalyst for ground-breaking change.

Morris is frequently called upon to share his expertise in entrepreneurship, innovation and leadership, mission and purpose-focused businesses, and building a tech unicorn. He was named a Fulbright Specialist Scholar in late 2020. Morris’s leadership encouraged the creation of an innovation team, the RUBICONSmartCity team.

RUBICONSmartCity brings technology and sustainability together for maximum community impact by providing equity in public service delivery and arming city leaders with data-driven insights that lead to improved customer service, better quality of life, and more sustainable, resilient, and equitable neighbourhoods. It provides insights that allow cities and municipalities to do more with less, saving money for cities and taxpayers.

Michael Allegretti

One of these leaders is Michael Allegretti, Rubicon’s chief strategy officer, leading the company’s RUBICONSmartCity SaaS business. He also oversees all public policy, corporate communications and marketing operations, company-wide. He came to Rubicon after leading public policy for Uber Technologies in the company’s largest global market, New York City. He has a passion for sustainability and the environment, which made Rubicon a perfect fit.

Allegretti has been directly responsible for the growth of RUBICONSmartCity, conceiving the market opportunity and the product. He developed the ideas of transforming waste and recycling vehicles into roaming data collection assets, and of positioning Rubicon as the catalyst to help achieve the vision of proactive government. He is often asked to weigh-in on the strategic use of technology to solve pressing city issues, with a focus on sustainability and savings for cities and taxpayers.

Conor Riffle

Along with Michael Allegretti, the vice-president of Smart Cities, Conor Riffle, leads the drive to build Rubicon’s technology business with city governments. His insights and expertise working with cities — always with a focus on the environment and achieving greater community equity — are notable in the technology industry. Prior to his appointment at Rubicon, he served as director of cities and data product innovation at the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an international environmental non-profit.

Under Riffle’s leadership, CDP’s cities programme achieved global recognition as the premier platform for city governments to report climate-change data. His experience has been invaluable to build, improve, and expand RUBICONSmartCity.

Allegretti, Riffle, and their team interact with governments, helping them balance budgetary constraints with the sustainability and customer service goals they hope to achieve. The RUBICONSmartCity team and technology help to create resilience in forward-thinking cities — something needed now more than ever in cities and municipalities across the world.