We are proud to announce the list of 30 individuals who made it to our Waste Influencers List this year. Every person on this list is there because they communicated about waste management in a way that resonated with their audiences on social media. We used a unique method developed by Eric Metelka to select the people who made the list. (You can read about that method at the bottom of this post.) Also be sure to check out our Waste Influencers List on Twitter, which is updated constantly so you can connect with even more leaders in the industry.

Last year, we published the first Waste Influencers list. It consisted of 30 individuals that met the criteria developed by Eric. The list was called the 2014 be Waste Wise 30 – Individual Waste Influencers.

But just last month, we also published another list. This was a list of 30 organizations that we believed communicated well about waste and were able to engage their audience in various waste-related topics. This was called the 2015 be Waste Wise 30 Influencers – Organizations.

If you are in this list or on the Twitter list, to find how you did relatively write to us at [email protected]. We’ll be glad to provide the data for free. be Waste Wise is a non-profit organization and our motive is to enhance collaboration and the dialogue on waste solutions. We would love to work with the curious ones among you to explore other ways to use this data to achieve our objectives. You can also tweet to us @bewastewise.

We look forward to increased collaborations in waste communications. To stay updated about The 2015 be Waste Wise 30 – Individual Influencers, please follow us on social media or subscribe to our monthly newsletter.

Finally, remember to follow these influencers or subscribe to the Twitter List to see what they’re sharing about waste.

THE 2015 WASTE INFLUENCERS LIST – INDIVIDUALS

Findings are based on data updated on July 7, 2015 and the individuals are ordered alphabetically.

How we found our Influencers

We started with our Twitter Waste Influencers list, which had 95 members on February 17, 2014. That list eventually grew to include 415 members by July 7, 2015.

We looked at four key metrics for all 415 members (from data which is publicly available). Our goal was to choose influencers who had high content quality, content quantity, and social media popularity. We then created separate lists for individual influencers and influential organizations. The list of individuals will be published on August 4, 2015.

Specifically, we looked at four key metrics:

• Follower-to-following ratio on twitter – this is a measure of popularity, which reflects how connected, relevant or representative they are.
• Average number of tweets per day – this is one way to measure how active an account is.
• Social Authority score – this is a metric from Followerwonk that is highly correlated with the number of retweets an account gets. It measures quality of content shared.
• Klout score – this metric from Klout is highly correlated with follower counts on all social networks. It is another measure of popularity, but across all social channels.