Richard Fuller (environmentalist)


Richard Fuller is an Australian-born, US-based engineer, entrepreneur and environmentalist best known for his work in global pollution remediation. He is President of the nonprofit Pure Earth; co-chair of The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health; he established the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, and founded the leading sustainable waste management company
In June 2018, Fuller was awarded the Order of Australia Medal in recognition of his service to conservation and the environment. In October 2019, Fuller received an from the Australian government for his 20 years of pioneering work with Pure Earth and his leadership in tacking the issue as "a toxic pollution fighting hero"
Fuller has focused on the problem of global pollution and its impact on health for nearly 20 years, having been driven by its neglect in the global agenda. In a 2010 profile, Time magazine's Power of One column described his motivation: “The low priority that the world—including the media—tends to place on toxic pollution in developing countries is one of the reasons Fuller founded the nonprofit Blacksmith Institute”.
Working with Pure Earth and the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, Fuller was part of a global team that successfully worked to broaden the scope of toxic pollution addressed in the Sustainable Development Goals, as described in a profile in the UN Dispatch.
In 2017, Fuller ushered in the publication of the landmark report from The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, which concluded that pollution is the largest environmental cause of death in the world, killing over 9 million people worldwide, threatening the "continuing survival of human societies."
The report generated immense global interest, reaching over 2 billion people worldwide with news coverage including the Guardian, PBS NewsHour and Fareed Zakaria, who devoted his "What In The World" segment to the report.
In an open letter to mark the release of the report from The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, Fuller writes: “For too long, pollution has been sidelined, overshadowed, ignored by the world, in part because it is a complicated topic with many causes, and as many outcomes. Often it kills slowly, and indirectly, hiding its tracks. With this report, we bring pollution out of the shadows.”
In a 2015 interview on The Takeaway on NPR, Fuller noted the differences in approaches to climate change and pollution: "... over the last couple of decades, climate change has taken over as the key environmental issue. So now we find that the agenda of these countries is biodiversity and climate change, and pollution has simply dropped off the map. This is an extraordinary result and one we really need to turn around."
Although toxic pollution is widespread, Fuller believes it is one global problem that can be solved. “There’s a finite number of polluted sites out there, and you can fix them for relatively little.” "The good news is we have known technologies and proven strategies for eliminating a lot of this pollution."

Early career

Richard Fuller graduated with a degree in Engineering from Melbourne University and began work for IBM. He left Australia in 1988 to work directly on global environmental issues in the Amazon rainforests of Brazil with the United Nations Environmental Programme. He then brought his experience to New York, establishing in 1989 to work on sustainability and commercial waste and recycling solutions for buildings and corporations in the pioneering days of corporate social responsibility. Realizing that enhancing sustainability practices to corporations alone would not have enough impact on global environmental issues, Fuller used profits from Great Forest to launch the nonprofit Pure Earth to tackle the problem on a larger scale. A portion of Great Forest's profits continues to support Pure Earth's work. Fuller serves as president of both Pure Earth and Great Forest.

Pure Earth/Blacksmith Institute: Building A Model For Global Pollution Cleanup

In 1999, Fuller established Blacksmith Institute to focus on pollution remediation. Pure Earth is dedicated to solving pollution problems in low and middle-income countries, where human health is at risk. It is the only significant nonprofit organization working in global pollution cleanup.
Over the years, Pure Earth has completed over 120 cleanup pilot projects in 24 countries, and assessed over 5000 toxic sites in 50 countries. Highlights include:
In his first decade with Pure Earth, Fuller created a number of initiatives that established a model for global pollution cleanup. Fuller recognized the need to measure and quantify pollution in order to set priorities and push governments for action. The set of tools he developed are still being used today to rapidly identify, assess and rank polluted sites in order to prioritize cleanup. They include:
In 2012, while Pure Earth continued to clean up polluted communities, Fuller founded the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution to bring countries together to build public, political, technical and financial support to address pollution globally, and assist low- and middle-income countries to fight pollution.
These efforts led Fuller to help convene and co-chair the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, an initiative of The Lancet, the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, with additional coordination and input from United Nations Environment, United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and the World Bank.
Following the release of the groundbreaking Commission report, Fuller was invited to present the report's findings at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in February 2018. He was also invited to provide briefings of the report at the World Bank, the UN, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the OECD, and other key international development and professional meetings.
In October 2018, Fuller joined former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy; Erik Solheim, UNEP; Dr. Philip Landrigan, Boston College; and Pushpam Kumar, UNEP at the launch of the Global Observatory on Pollution and Health. The new initiative will target issues raised by the Pollution Commission, and function as an international clearinghouse for all data available on pollution and health. Pure Earth will oversee the coordination and collection of input and data worldwide, and will make the crucial trove of information available on pollution.org.

Advocacy: Children and the Poisoned Poor

Fuller's focus is not just on pollution in general, but specifically on disease-causing pollution that impacts the health of people, especially those living in low and middle-income countries.
“Toxic chemicals from industry and mining affect the health of hundreds of millions of people in low- and middle-income countries,” he wrote in The Poisoned Poor in 2012.
"We've already solved most of the pollution problems in the West. There aren't people dying in droves in the U.S. or in England - they're all dying overseas, in low- and middle-income countries," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. on the publication of his 2015 book "The Brown Agenda."
Fuller believes that pollution is one of the most serious problems facing the earth. "The health of roughly 100 million people is at risk from pollution in developing countries."
"A particular concern...is the accumulating and long-lasting burden building up in the environment and in the bodies of the people most directly affected."
In 2014, Bloomberg Businessweek chronicled Blacksmith/Pure Earth's growth. The article offered a behind-the-scenes look at how Fuller came upon a secret abandoned chemical weapons factory site in the Ukraine that was sitting on top of a forgotten "bomb", and worked to make the site safe before the onset of hostilities in the area. The article also explained: "Fuller’s mission is to help kids play safely on the beach or bathe in a river, not save spotted owls and polar bears. He also knew he wanted to serve the poor, because “the U.S. has the resources to clean up its own Superfund sites.” Mostly, he didn't want to be another nongovernmental organization dedicated merely to raising awareness."
In 2017 The UNEP acknowledged Fuller’s message publishing “The Impact of Pollution on Planetary Health: Emergence of an Underappreciated Risk Factor.” 
A paper he co-authored, Pollution and Children's Health, points out that “Pollution was responsible in 2016 for 940,000 deaths in children, two-thirds under age 5,” and that “92% of pollution-related deaths in children occur in low- and middle-income countries.” His conclusion was that “pollution prevention presents a major, largely unexploited opportunity to improve children’s health especially in low and middle-income countries."

Calling Attention to the Global Pollution Crisis

" … toxic pollution is the largest cause of death in the world. Yet it is one of the most underreported and underfunded global problems," Fuller told the World Bank.
Fuller's efforts to call attention to the crisis took many forms, including:
In 2015, Santa Monica Press published "The Brown Agenda: My Mission To Clean Up The World's Most Life-Threatening Pollution", written by Fuller and Damon DiMarco. The book documents his adventures at some of the world's most toxic locations, and introduces readers to the plight of the poisoned poor, suggesting specific ways in which anyone can help combat brown sites all over the world.