Jonathan Straight

Jonathan is an award-winning purposeful entrepreneur and creative best known for founding the AIM-listed Straight plc (STT), the UK’s leading supplier of waste and recycling containers. He headed the business for 21 years before exiting in 2014. He currently helps business and organisations to achieve their full potential.

Jonathan is a board advisor to Surplus Group Limited, tackling the problem of surplus and waste food, and is chairman of WasteAid, an international charity developing recycling and waste management programmes in lower-income parts of the world.

Since 2022, Jonathan has been a member of the British Library Advisory Council and is helping to realise the ambition of a British Library of the North in Leeds.

Passionate about entrepreneurship, he is an enterprise ambassador at the Leeds University Business School and an entrepreneur in residence for Connect Yorkshire.

He is also a published and exhibited, award-winning photographer, specialising in street, reportage and portrait genres, working predominantly in black and white. In 2022, he won the prestigious Portrait of Britain competition. He has been an occasional presenter on local television and hopes to publish a memoir as soon as he finds the time to finish it.