Annie Leonard

Annie Leonard
Leonard in February 2017
Born	1964 Newark, Delaware
Occupation	Executive Director, Greenpeace USA
Genre	Consumerism, Ecology
Notable works	The Story of Stuff
Children	One daughter, Dewi
Website
storyofstuff.org

Annie Leonard (born 1964) is an American proponent of sustainability and a critic of consumerism. She created the animated film The Story of Stuff (2007), which describes the life cycle of material goods. In 2014, she became the Executive Director of Greenpeace USA.

Leonard was born in Seattle, Washington, where she also grew up. She graduated from the Lakeside School, and has an undergraduate degree from Barnard College and a graduate degree from Cornell University in City and Regional Planning.

After interning at the National Wildlife Federation in the late 1980s, Leonard began working with Greenpeace on a campaign to ban international waste dumping, traveling around the world to track garbage and hazardous waste sent from developed to less developed countries. “I was sneaking into the factories where it was being disposed, interviewing the workers, taking hair samples and soil samples to prove the environmental health harm,” she later explained in an interview with Cornell University.

In 1992, she testified in front of the US Congress on the topic of international waste trafficking. The work of Greenpeace and other organizations led to the 1992 Basel Convention, an international treaty to protect less developed countries from the dumping of hazardous waste by transnational corporations based in developed countries.

Leonard is best known as the creator and narrator of the animated documentary about the life cycle of material goods, The Story of Stuff (2007). The documentary began as an hour-long talk and was made into a condensed film version based on popular demand. She also wrote a book version of the film, published in 2010 in the United States by Free Press of Simon & Schuster, in the UK by Constable & Robinson, and in Germany by Econ Verlag.