One of the world’s leading experts in supply chains, Edwin Keh has been CEO of public research institute the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel since 2012, after a previous career spent working in logistics roles for some of the world’s leading companies.

His interest in the business of moving stuff around was sparked in an unusual way: when he spent nearly two years working in refugee camps for the UNHCR, starting as a summer job when he was at college in the US.

“I was studying a sociology programme, and thought that was what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life,” he says. “But I was frustrated and distressed by what I saw in the refugee camps. I watched people die unnecessarily of diseases because the medicine couldn’t get to them. I couldn’t work out how to be more useful in that situation.”

He went to business school and then worked in logistics. Drawn to the apparel industry by the complexity of its supply chains, he worked for many years for companies including Donna Karan and, from 2008 to 2010, as chief operating officer of Walmart. He has always had a strong thread of social consciousness in his work, though; when he was offered the Walmart job, he initially spent three months turning the retail giant down, preferring to focus on his work on sustainability and circularity. He eventually relented, driven by the chance to make a difference in one of the world’s largest companies.

“Walmart is huge,” he says. “It’s in 51 countries. You’re purchasing about US$1 billion worth a day. You can’t have more fun, but I always felt I was in supply chains under false pretences.”

He was offered a further 10-year contract by the company but turned it down, instead spending two years running his own consulting firm, providing advice to corporations and, pro bono, to non-profits.

Then, “In 2012 the Hong Kong government came to me with this failing R&D centre. I thought it was a two-year project to assess it and possibly close it down. But the more I looked at it, the more I realised it had an opportunity to affect a large industry,” he says.

He has run HKRITA ever since, initiating 20 to 30 projects a year and running more than 50 at a time. The institute has become well known for its focus on sustainability: high-tech synthetic materials and also technological solutions to make the production of natural fibres such as cotton less environmentally damaging, for example by reducing water consumption. It has developed a cotton T-shirt that can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and is even growing cotton in Hong Kong, and experimenting with the use of carbon as a fertiliser for it. It opened its own recycling facility in 2018 and is building another.

In addition to his job at HKRITA, Keh also teaches at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.