Life Stories
Peter Richard White
Peter Richard White (1974 BA, DPhil Zoology) died on 10 March 2025 aged 68.
Dr Peter (Pete) Richard White died unexpectedly on 10 March 2025, aged 68 years. He enjoyed a fulfilling career that spanned academic studies in chemical ecology to working in industry promoting sustainability and biodiversity.
Pete grew up in Tottenham, North London, where his pastimes included membership of an unlikely scout troupe that wore kilts and played the bagpipes. It was also there that, perhaps equally unlikely, he first developed his love of sailing and, importantly, for wildlife and biology. He came up to Keble with an open scholarship to read Zoology—a distinction that required the occasional reading of grace; he took much delight in pronouncing the Latin in his London accent. As well as being academically accomplished, as an undergraduate, he played scrum half for the Keble XV and organised a zoological expedition to Malawi where he experienced an immediate fascination with Africa.
After graduating, his desire to return to Africa led him to spend two years teaching with VSO in Nigeria where he met Helen, who was to become his wife. On his return to the UK, he completed a masters in hydrobiology at London University, before returning to Oxford to embark on a DPhil in chemical ecology. Postdoctoral research at the Universities of California, Berkeley, and Arizona followed, from where he took up a demonstratorship in the Department of Zoology at Oxford and a college lectureship at Trinity College.
In the early 1990s, he left academia to apply his skills to industry by joining the Environmental Science Department of Procter and Gamble in Newcastle upon Tyne. At P&G he was instrumental in advancing the notion that sustainability must be a core value, ‘part of the everyday fabric’, as he would say. He co-authored a pioneering work on life cycle analysis —the concept that a product’s environmental impact must be measured over its whole life, from sourcing its raw materials through to its final disposal. His vision culminated in the early 2000s, when P&G established a Department of Global Sustainability and Pete became its director. In 2013, he moved to spread the sustainability message more widely as VP and COO of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in Geneva. Through WBCSD, he promoted the role of business in biodiversity at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15). Following retirement in 2020, he spent a year as Professor of Practice, Business & Biodiversity at Exeter University.
Pete was devoted to his family and was never happier than when skippering a sailing boat in the Mediterranean with all of them aboard. In 2016, his love of adventure took a loftier turn. Inspired by a view of Mont Blanc from his office window in Geneva, he took up alpine mountaineering and over the following years reached twenty 4000-metre summits, including Mont Blanc.
Peter is mourned by friends and family, especially his wife, Helen, children Jessica, Joe, and Harry, and grandchildren Vesper and Louis.
Kindly provided by his contemporary, Adrian Rees (1974)