Christine Wolfe

Director of Government Affairs, WM

This story is part of our July 2025 Young Professionals issue, photographed at Bradshaw Animal Shelter. To learn more about adopting at Bradshaw, click here.

If someone has a good hobby recommendation for Christine Wolfe, she would love to hear it. Until then, daily life for this director of government affairs for WM for California, Nevada and Hawaii is primarily about work.

“I’ve been telling everyone that I’m trying to learn to fly fish,” she says, laughing. “The Sacramento Valley region is famous for fly fishing, but I have taken basically no steps to actually move that learning forward.”

Wolfe joined WM (formerly Waste Management), a waste management and recycling services provider, in February 2024. In Sacramento, she leads legislative and regulatory engagement on behalf of WM, working with environmental, business and other thought leaders, as well as customers, to help shape policy.

Additionally, Wolfe is often out in the field throughout three Western states, visiting recycling operations, landfills and compost facilities. That’s how she gains a technical understanding of how their facilities work, what challenges arise and why certain regulations exist. This equips her to speak in an educated way with policymakers in Sacramento — it also involves constant traveling. “I do feel like I live at Terminal B in the Sacramento airport,” she says.

Originally from the small mountain town of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Wolfe was raised by a single mother who owned a women’s clothing store. Wolfe admired her mother, and it was just the two of them; her mom now lives in Oakland, and they remain close. Despite growing up in the mountains, Wolfe calls herself a mediocre snowboarder among peers who basically ended up becoming Olympic-level skiers. She jokes: “They basically kicked me out of Colorado.”

“You really have to understand the full lay of the land to understand where everyone’s coming from. Even if you don’t agree with somebody or you don’t feel somebody’s coming from an honest place, at least you’ve heard all that feedback and you can make your
own decision.”

Wolfe earned her bachelor’s degree in neurobiology from Harvard University. She has worked in environmental policy for about 10 years. Through her involvement on infrastructure development projects in the Bay Area, she entered the waste and recycling industry. She later worked as policy director for California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance, a nonpartisan and nonprofit trade association that represents business and labor unions. Then she went in-house at WM.

One of Wolfe’s career highlights involves her work for more than five years so far on the development and implementation of a new state law intended to increase the recycling of plastic and packaging. If the law meets its intentions, she says, it will create more demand for post-consumer recycled materials and could close the loop on hard-to-recycle items. She says WM’s upgrades and investments at its facilities are ready to handle these materials at scale.

“It’s one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to work on something that, if all the pieces come together, could solve a big challenge — driving more demand for recycled materials, which will increase recycling rates across different types of materials, including plastics,” she says.

During her career, Wolfe has learned that truly grasping what makes good policy  requires listening to others and putting oneself in different situations to be exposed to people with differing opinions.

“That’s really the only way to understand how to move forward on things and not get stuck in biases or old ways of thinking,” she says. “You really have to understand the full lay of the land to understand where everyone’s coming from. Even if you don’t agree with somebody,  at least you’ve heard all that feedback and you can make your own decision.”

Besides her traveling for work, Wolfe recently took a trip to Steamboat Springs to visit friends. And while Wolfe has not yet found time to learn fly fishing, she hasn’t given up hope. “I’m going to get there,” she says. “By the time I retire, I’ll be a professional fly fisherwoman.”

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