Barbara Reck is a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment. She holds a doctorate in environmental engineering from TU Berlin and, prior to joining Yale, worked as Manager Environmental Affairs at Lufthansa German Airlines. She studies material cycles, their degree of circularity, recycling barriers, and implications for embodied carbon; work that informs environmental and resource policy as well as circular economy assessments. Her systems approach to material analyses is rooted in detailed material flow studies for metals (but also extends to plastics) that led to the development of internationally recognized, harmonized metal recycling indicators, analyses of metal recycling rates that identified recycling barriers and the corresponding energy implications, metal criticality assessments, and scenarios on the future supply and demand of key technology metals. More recently, she studies the potential of substituting carbon-intensive conventional building materials in urban settings with low-carbon bio- and geogenic alternatives from sustainable supply chains. Barbara serves as Node Lead Systems Analysis & Integration at the U.S. REMADE Institute and as Director Material Systems at Bauhaus Earth.
