The Week in Low Carbon Commerce - January 16, 2024

On mid-career pivots

Author

Keith Anderson
January 16, 2024

The Week in Low Carbon Commerce
January 16, 2024

Since the New Year, I’ve had a dozen or more conversations with people searching for a new role—many of them considering a pivot they feel under-qualified to pursue.

In this edition, I’ll share how almost anyone can find work they find more rewarding.

But first, also this week:

  • News — Lots of new research on reuse and recycling

  • Retailer updates on Amazon, Walmart, M&S, and Aldi

  • Deals and funding 

  • Jobs — Including many for those with conventional skills and without sustainability experience

  • Podcast — Refillable, reusable packaging is having a moment. Learn more in this week’s episode.

  • Upcoming events - More on Decarbonize.co’s February webinar series

On mid-career pivots

Like health and relationships, the new year is a natural time to reflect on your career. So it hasn’t been surprising to hear from so many people open to opportunities or actively searching for something new.

For some people, it’s as simple as having been passed over for a promotion, or being affected by a layoff.

But I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that want to move from whatever they’re doing into climate and sustainability.

A common concern is that the roles they’ve discovered require significant prior sustainability experience or specialized degrees.

And, to be fair, if you’re looking for jobs with climate or sustainability in the job title, those probably are valid barriers if you’ve never done “climate work.”

But I think there’s a viable path for almost anyone to pivot mid-career—and it works whether you want to get into climate, AI, retail media, or pretty much anything.

When I think about career transitions, I picture someone swinging from one vine to the next over an alligator pit.

If you don’t want to fall, you need to grab the next vine before you let go of the one you’re holding.

When you want to pursue an industry or role you’re not deeply experienced in, your odds of success are best when you leverage your existing skills, expertise, or network to join a company or land a role closer to what you want to be doing.

If you visit the Decarbonize.co Career Board, at a high-level, you’ll find two types of jobs:

  1. Jobs with “Sustainability” or “Climate” in the title

  2. Jobs with titles like “Customer Success,” “Business Development,” “Account Management,” “Product,” “Marketing,” “Strategy,” and “Sales.”

If you’re not experienced or educated in climate and sustainability, your best bet is to focus on #2.

These are climate and sustainability jobs too, because all of them are at companies with a strategic or mission orientation to make commerce more sustainable.

Some of these companies focus on packaging. Others make software. Others fight food waste. Others are in logistics. We’ve identified and profiled almost 400 of them.

They’re all doing something to reinvent retail, ecommerce, and consumer products to be lower-carbon and more sustainable.

And they all need people with the skills any business needs to be viable.

If you browse these job descriptions, you’ll notice that climate or sustainability experience is rarely mentioned in the role requirements. Instead, climate is referenced in the description of the company’s mission, products, or services.

Will it help a candidate to have a foundational understanding of climate vocabulary, concepts, and practices? Absolutely.

But for many of these roles, the demand is for candidates that know the ins and outs of retailing and consumer products and have experience in disciplines like shopper marketing, category management, or buying.

The Decarbonize.co Career Board makes it pretty easy to search by keyword and filter by role, seniority, region, and more. You can even set up alerts so you won’t miss a new job.

So, if you’re considering making a pivot, perhaps it would help to broaden how you define the work you want to be doing.

By the way, I’m really enjoying all of these conversations, so if you’d like to discuss your work, you can use this link to set something up.

-Keith

News

🐝 B Lab, the independent non-profit that certifies B Corporations, is in the process of updating its certification standards, with a goal to make requirements clearer and to keep pace with fast-evolving challenges and practices.
[Link]

♻️ The WEF released a whitepaper titled Scaling Reuse Models: A Guide to Standardized Measurement. The paper identifies two priority metrics to assess progress on reuse:

  1. Share of volume or units: Measured as the share of volume or units sold as an indicator of what percentage of a company’s product portfolio is reusable.

  2. Reuse effectiveness: Quantified as the “number of loops” that a reusable package completes during its lifecycle. The paper notes that this metric is more challenging to measure and will require industry capacity building.

For more on reuse, don’t miss the latest episode of the podcast with Catherine Conway of GoUnpackaged.
[Link]

♻️ The Recycling Partnership released its annual State of Recycling report, covering the U.S.

The report’s 5 key takeaways:

  1. 21% of residential recyclables are being recycled – every material type is under-recycled

  2. 76% of residential recyclables are lost at the household level

  3. Only 43% of households participate

  4. EPR policies drive improvement to all 5 requirements of an effective recycling system

  5. Private industry must invest beyond EPR to design packaging for recyclability, improve collection, and “harvest the opportunities in regions of greatest material loss”

[Link]

♻️ Closed Loop Partners released a report titled Unpacking Customer Perspectives on Reusable Packaging presenting insight from research on U.S.-based consumer perspectives.
[Link]

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Retailers

📦 Walmart, citing customer demand, is expanding its drone delivery pilots with partners Wing and Zipline to offer delivery to up to 75% of Dallas-Fort Worth metro households. Stores that offer the service, which complements other delivery options, will serve a 10-mile radius and deliver from a selection of thousands of items in 10 to 30 minutes.

Looking for a new gig? Both Wing and Zipline are hiring.
[Link]

♻️ Marks & Spencer will expand Refilled, its refillable and reusable packaging program for own-brand cleaning and laundry products, from a six-store pilot to 19 new stores, bringing the total to 25.

Developed in partnership with Reposit, the Refilled program offers shoppers 10 pre-filled homecare products. The first purchase includes a £2 fee for the returnable bottle, which can be returned to store for a £2 voucher redeemable for a second purchase from the M&S Refilled range. To date, more than 10,000 M&S customers have engaged with the program.
[Link]

👚 Amazon is using AI to help shoppers buy clothes that fit, helping reduce fit-related returns. Coresight Research estimates that the average return rate of online apparel orders in the US is 24.4%, while Optoro estimates that emissions from ecommerce returns are equivalent to the average annual emissions of 5.1 million cars.
[Link]

🛍️ Aldi U.S. eliminated plastic bags from its 2,300+ stores in the U.S. It also shared plans to transition to natural refrigerants by 2035.
[Link (PDF)]

Deals and funding

👩‍💻 Sphera acquired supply chain sustainability software company SupplyShift.
[Link]

👚 Veo, a “sustainable lifestyle platform” based in Manchester, England, raised a £1.4M seed round for a project aimed at broadening access to LifeCycle Assessments (LCAs) for the Fashion industry.
[Link]

🥒 Pickler, a climate footprint software startup that enables packaging companies to calculate, reduce, and share the impact of packaging, raised €500k.
[Link]

🥛 Standing Ovation, based in Paris, raised €3 million to begin industrial production of its animal-free casein.
[Link]

From the podcast

Unpacking Refill and Reuse Packaging with Catherine Conway of GoUnpackaged

Listen as Keith interviews Catherine Conway, Director and Reuse Lead for GoUnpackaged, about her work with the Refill Coalition, a group of UK-based retailers working together to develop a standardized, but also modular and adaptable approach to reusable and refillable packaging. They also discuss drivers and barriers to reuse/refill and some of the pending legislation in Europe and beyond.

decarbonize.co/podcast/ep-10-unpacking-refill-and-reuse-packaging-with-catherine-conway-of-gounpackaged

And if you are a subscriber? Share it with your colleagues, or let us know who you’d love to hear on the show next.

Upcoming Events

Virtual events are a great way to get to know Decarbonize.co, and we have three webinars featuring our analyst research coming up in February.

Members can attend at no cost, or you can license enterprise-wide access for a modest fee.

Check out all of the jobs (or post your open roles) on the Decarbonizing Commerce Career Board.