Heinz Böni was born in 1959 in St. Gallen/Switzerland and got his degree in Rural Engineering in 1983 from ETH Zürich. After completing postgraduate studies in water supply and wastewater management at EAWAG Dübendorf he worked some years as junior scientist at ETH and then followed his intrinsic motivation to work in development cooperation, where he got assigned as head of the Central Sanitation and Training Unit at UNICEF in Kathmandu/Nepal. After this out of the box experience he decided to work in in the area of environmental engineering and planning for a private engineering company in Switzerland dedicating himself to the area of waste management.
In 1997 he founded his own company Ecopartner Ltd. which was working in similar fields. Due to his broad experience in both environmental issues and development cooperation he got assigned in 2001 by the Swiss Federal Institute for Material Science and Technology (Empa) as head of the Sustainable Technology Cooperation group where he was working on development cooperation projects in the areas of Cleaner Production and Electronic waste management with a focus on Latin-America.
The group reoriented itself in 2012 into the area of Critical Materials and Resource Efficiency working besides other areas in e-waste management projects in developing countries. Besides his original profession as an engineer he is since 2014 working occasionally as mediator and coach.
