Paul Tasner
Paul Tasner, Co-founder and CEO of PulpWorks and, more recently, Co-founder of Sort,
has more than 40 years of operations experience. He has held leadership positions in
ventures ranging from start-up to Fortune 100. For the past decade, his focus has been on
sustainability.
Paul’s corporate affiliations include The Clorox Company, Clif Bar, Method Products,
and Hepagen Vaccines. He has authored numerous papers and presentations on supply
chain sustainability and currently lectures on this subject in the MBA Programs at San
Francisco State University and Golden Gate University as well as the Packaging
Engineering Department at San Jose State University. He holds a B.S. in Industrial
Engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Mathematics
from Boston University.
Eight years ago, Paul took a leap of faith. While his peers were contemplating
retirement, he embraced the challenge of disrupting the traditional packaging industry.
Appalled by the amount of plastic pollution on our planet and no longer content to accept
the dangers of plastic packaging materials, he founded PulpWorks and set out to create
safe, eco-friendly packaging for consumer products. PulpWorks uses paper and
agricultural waste to mold compostable packaging and thereby diminish the waste
deposited in our landfills, waterways and oceans. In 2016, PulpWorks was awarded a
patent for their Karta-Pack™ – a compostable replacement for the toxic plastic blister
pack.
PulpWorks and Paul have been the recipients of more than 20 awards and the subject of
more than 75 stories in the media.
Paul was selected as a TED Resident in 2017. His TED Talk on sustainability,
entrepreneurism and ageism has been seen by more than 2 million viewers and translated
into 29 languages.
In 2018, Paul, with colleagues in San Francisco and Mexico City, founded Sort, a
company using artificial intelligence, the IoT, and computer vision technology, to solve
the contamination challenges facing the plastics recycling industry today.