♻️ We're Hiring: Circular Economy Manager
📍 Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)
🕒 Employment Type: Full-Time
💼 Experience Level: Mid-Level to Senior
🌐 Work Arrangement: Fully Remote
About Us
We are an organization committed to accelerating the transition toward a circular economy through resource efficiency, sustainable product and service models, responsible consumption, waste reduction, material recovery, reuse, refurbishment, recycling, and innovative circular business practices.
Our distributed teams collaborate across Circular Economy, Sustainability, ESG, Procurement, Product, Design, Engineering, Operations, Supply Chain, Logistics, Finance, Strategy, Innovation, Legal, Compliance, Government Relations, and Executive Leadership to reduce resource dependency, minimize waste, extend product lifecycles, and create long-term environmental and commercial value.
The Role
We are seeking an experienced and strategic Circular Economy Manager to lead the development and implementation of circular-economy strategies, programs, business models, resource-efficiency initiatives, sustainable product approaches, waste-reduction programs, circular procurement, and material-recovery solutions.
The ideal candidate will identify opportunities to redesign products, services, processes, and supply chains around circular principles while balancing environmental impact, customer needs, operational feasibility, financial performance, and long-term business value.
Key Responsibilities
- Develop and implement the organization's circular economy strategy, framework, roadmap, policies, programs, and annual action plans.
- Translate circular-economy principles into practical business strategies, operating models, products, services, procurement practices, and supply-chain initiatives.
- Assess current business models, products, materials, processes, and supply chains to identify opportunities for circularity and resource optimization.
- Develop circularity roadmaps covering product design, sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, use, reuse, repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing, recycling, and end-of-life management.
- Identify opportunities to reduce material consumption, waste generation, virgin-resource dependency, and environmental impact.
- Lead circular-economy initiatives focused on reuse, repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing, recycling, recovery, sharing, product life extension, and resource efficiency.
- Develop and evaluate circular business models, including product-as-a-service, leasing, take-back, buy-back, resale, refurbishment, sharing, repair, reuse, and closed-loop models where applicable.
- Conduct feasibility assessments and business cases for circular initiatives, including financial, operational, environmental, customer, and supply-chain considerations.
- Collaborate with Strategy, Finance, Innovation, Product, Commercial, and Operations teams to evaluate the commercial potential of circular business opportunities.
- Develop lifecycle and circularity assessments for products, services, materials, and processes.
- Work with Product, Design, and Engineering teams to integrate circular-design principles into new and existing products.
- Promote design for durability, repairability, modularity, disassembly, recyclability, reuse, and material recovery.
- Support product-development teams in reducing material complexity and improving end-of-life recovery.
- Identify opportunities to increase the use of recycled, renewable, recovered, reused, refurbished, and responsibly sourced materials.
- Develop strategies to reduce dependence on virgin materials and improve secondary-material utilization.
- Collaborate with Procurement and Sustainable Procurement teams to integrate circularity criteria into sourcing, supplier selection, contracting, and purchasing decisions.
- Develop circular procurement guidelines covering product longevity, repairability, recycled content, take-back arrangements, reusable products, and end-of-life management.
- Work with suppliers to identify circular materials, components, packaging, products, and service models.
- Establish supplier requirements and performance indicators relating to material efficiency, recycled content, recyclability, take-back, recovery, waste reduction, and circularity.
- Collaborate with Supply Chain and Logistics teams to optimize reverse logistics, product returns, collection systems, refurbishment flows, material recovery, and closed-loop supply chains.
- Develop and improve take-back, collection, return, repair, refurbishment, resale, recycling, and recovery programs.
- Assess opportunities to establish reverse logistics networks and efficient recovery channels.
- Collaborate with Operations and Facilities teams to reduce operational waste and improve resource efficiency.
- Develop waste-prevention, reuse, segregation, recovery, recycling, and resource-recovery initiatives across relevant operations.
- Identify opportunities to divert materials from landfill and maximize reuse, recycling, recovery, and beneficial utilization.
- Develop material-flow assessments and identify major sources of resource loss, waste, inefficiency, and leakage.
- Monitor material consumption, waste generation, recovery rates, recycled content, reuse rates, product lifespans, and other circularity indicators.
- Establish circular economy KPIs and targets covering material efficiency, waste reduction, reuse, repair, refurbishment, recycling, recovery, recycled content, product life extension, and resource productivity.
Ideal Candidate
The successful candidate should have experience in circular economy, sustainability, sustainable business, resource efficiency, waste management, sustainable product development, sustainable procurement, supply-chain sustainability, ESG, environmental management, innovation, or related fields.
Experience working with manufacturers, retailers, consumer brands, construction companies, industrial organizations, technology businesses, logistics companies, or complex supply chains is highly advantageous.
The candidate should demonstrate:
- Strong understanding of circular economy principles, including reduce, reuse, repair, refurbish, remanufacture, recycle, and recover.
- Proven experience developing and implementing circular-economy strategies, programs, business models, or transformation initiatives.
- Strong understanding of product lifecycle management, circular design, material efficiency, resource productivity, and end-of-life strategies.
- Experience developing circular business cases and assessing financial, operational, environmental, and commercial feasibility.
- Strong understanding of waste prevention, recycling, recovery, reverse logistics, take-back systems, and material recovery.
- Experience working with sustainable procurement, responsible sourcing, recycled materials, renewable materials, or circular supply chains.
- Strong understanding of lifecycle thinking, lifecycle assessment, material-flow analysis, and circularity measurement.
- Experience developing KPIs, dashboards, circularity metrics, sustainability reports, and impact assessments.
- Strong project and program-management capabilities with experience leading cross-functional initiatives.
- Strong stakeholder-management skills and ability to build partnerships across suppliers, customers, government entities, technology providers, recyclers, NGOs, and industry organizations.
- Strong analytical, financial, strategic-thinking, and problem-solving capabilities.
- Ability to translate sustainability and circular-economy concepts into commercially viable business initiatives.
- Strong understanding of environmental, sustainability, ESG, waste, resource, and supply-chain issues.
- Experience with circular procurement, sustainable materials, product stewardship, extended producer responsibility, or reverse logistics is highly advantageous.
- Strong communication, presentation, negotiation, facilitation, and influencing skills.
- Strong Microsoft Office skills, particularly Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
- Familiarity with lifecycle-assessment, carbon-accounting, ERP, procurement, supply-chain, material-tracking, ESG, or sustainability platforms.
- Knowledge of recognized circular-economy, sustainability, environmental, lifecycle, or resource-management standards is highly advantageous.
- Ability to balance environmental objectives with cost, quality, customer expectations, operational feasibility, supply continuity, and commercial performance.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills in English; Arabic is highly advantageous for UAE and broader GCC sustainability and circular-economy initiatives.
- Ability to work independently in a fully remote and internationally distributed environment.
- High level of integrity, innovation, accountability, commercial awareness, and commitment to environmental sustainability.
- Strong strategic, analytical, commercially minded, innovation-oriented, cross-functional, and sustainability-driven mindset.