Sr. Manager, Circularity

Company Overview

Why Choose Us?

Novolex is a leading manufacturer of food, beverage, and specialty packaging that supports multiple industries including foodservice, restaurant delivery and carryout, food processing, grocery and retail, and industrial sectors. Novolex manufacturing and sourcing expertise spans a diverse range of substrates including resin, paper, molded fiber, aluminum and more. We provide customers a broad array of stock and customized solutions with 120 product categories, 250 brands and over 39,000 SKUs.

Our Sustainability Commitment

The Novolex sustainability vision is built upon three pillars: our products, our operations and our people. Each is critically important to our growth and future as a business. These pillars form the foundation of our company-wide commitment to sustainability, helping us achieve our ambitious goals through our wide-ranging initiatives.

Job Description

How You'll Perform The RoleThe Senior Manager, Circularity supports the development and implementation of enterprise standards, tools, and guidance for how Novolex embeds circularity into product strategy, materials, and design. This role sits at the intersection of product engineering and commercial strategy, turning customer sustainability expectations into practical, scalable product solutions. This role contributes to Novolex’s center of excellence for circularity standards, design rules, certifications, data, and claims discipline.

Reporting to the VP, Sustainability, you will partner closely with Product Development, R&D, Commercial, Procurement, and Operations to implement and advance circularity initiatives across the product portfolio and to serve as a technical resource on circularity topics for internal teams, customers, and other partners.

 

Key Responsibilities

Circularity Strategy & Roadmap

• Support the execution and continuous improvement of the company’s circularity roadmap, across product categories, aligned with commercial and innovation priorities.
• Translate circularity principles (recyclability, compostability, reuse, PCR/renewables, recovery pathways) into clear design rules and guardrails for product teams.
• Develop, track and report on circularity KPIs and targets at the enterprise and category levels (e.g., end-of-life classifications, PCR/PIR inputs, renewable content, certification pathways).
• Identify and prioritize “lighthouse” circularity initiatives and customer pilots in partnership that demonstrate impact and are scalable across the portfolio.

 

Product Design, Engineering & Lifecycle Tools

• Partner with Product Development and R&D to embed circularity into stage-gate processes, material selection, specs, and design-for-recycling guidance.
• Execute lifecycle assessment (LCA), focusing on customer sustainable performance needs
• Ensure circularity metrics and claims are supported by structured data within ERP, PIM, MDM, and spec-management systems
• Provide technical leadership on certifications and labeling (e.g., recyclability, compostability, chain-of-custody), ensuring claims are substantiated, defensible and up to date.

 

Customer Collaboration & Commercial Support

• Serve as a key technical partner to strategic customers, helping translate their circularity and sustainability goals into feasible product options and category roadmaps in collaboration with Commercial and Product teams.
• Support strategic customer engagement, innovation days, RFPs, and meetings with clear circularity guidance, technical feasibility assessments, cost, risk, and performance analysis.
• Support development of category roadmaps with customers that link their goals (e.g., recyclability, recycled content, reuse targets, low-carbon solutions) with Novolex capabilities and planned innovations owned by product teams.
• Work with Commercial and Finance to contribute inputs (technical feasibility, assumptions, and tradeoffs) to support business case development.

 

Cross-Functional and External Collaboration

• Partner with Government Affairs to ensure Novolex design and circularity strategies align with policy trends, EPR requirements, labeling laws, and material regulations.
• Collaborate with recyclers, composters, material suppliers, certification bodies, and industry coalitions to shape realistic circularity pathways, new material validation, and infrastructure alignment.

Participate in relevant industry forums and working groups as needed.

 

Governance, Standards & Ways of Working

• Support the development and maintenance of circularity standards, playbooks, a