Packaging Sustainability Lead

Description

Andover or Poland

Great People Work Here

Are you searching for a career with bags of variety, in an environment that celebrates differences and empowers collaboration, which values people and will encourage you to make an impact? Do you want the freedom to explore, and the opportunities to find new ways and to innovate? If so, TwiningsOvo delivers.

We’re looking for people who don’t just come here to get the job done, but who have a real passion for the brand and a desire to do the best job they can. In return, we offer an inspiring package of employee benefits - to show just how much we value you. This role will offer you the scope for growth and the tools to aim high.

The Packaging Sustainability Lead is a Fixed Term Contract (2 years) role where you will be focused on accelerating and delivering priority sustainable packaging initiatives, translating strategy into technically robust, compliant solutions that are implemented at pace across key markets to enable the delivery of net zero commitments and minimise the environmental impact of our packaging. This is a highly pivotal, visible role in which you will be responsible for leading upfront packaging solution exploration to address sustainability challenges, ensuring alignment with legislative requirements, corporate environmental goals, and industry best practices.

This new role will monitor and interpret the evolving legislative landscape, enabling Twinings to proactively meet external and internal targets. Acting as a bridge between sustainability ambitions and practical execution, the Packaging Sustainability Lead will collaborate closely with internal cross-functional teams, external partners and industry experts to develop and deploy the implementation of sustainable packaging solutions to deliver both business and environmental objectives. It is key that product protection and consumer expectations are met, and the role will support our longer-term innovation pipeline to ensure that sustainability is kept at the fore front of development.

This is a fixed-term role, for 2 years.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Packaging Leadership

• Provide hands-on technical expertise in packaging materials, structures and specifications to assess sustainability solutions for application across the supply chain.
• Lead technical decisions and clearly articulate implications to stakeholders.
• Assess how emerging legislation materially changes packaging design, specifications or formats, and lead necessary technical or specification responses.
• Lead a cross functional team to define the technical success criteria, testing protocols and validation requirements for new sustainable materials and formats.
• Act as a technical escalation point for complex sustainability-led packaging questions.
• Work cross functionally to identify future tools or systems to enable efficient data gathering and reporting and own delivery of these tools.
• Drive the adoption of Design for Compliance approaches and tools.

Stakeholder Engagement & Reporting

• Apply change management principles to secure buy‑in, align functions, and turn sustainability recommendations into decisions and action.
• Drive the implementation of sustainability best practices throughout the Twinings business
• Work with cross functional teams (example, Procurement) to maintain, update and monitor dashboards. Where necessary implement systems or tracking to enable accurate reporting on progress towards targets.
• Represent Packaging function where required in Sustainability platforms and committees, e.g., TwO Environmental Due Diligence, Twinings Environmental Working group. Create clear recommendations to enable senior stakeholders to make informed decisions.
• In collaboration with Regulatory team, enable marketing teams to ensure that our consumers are educated and informed to allow correct disposal of packaging materials.
• Provide regular business updates to stakeholders to communicate trends, industry updates and insight into the wider sustainable packaging landscape.
• Work closely with Ovo to ensure that common challenges are shared and that alignment is gained on interpretation of legislation to ensure common approaches are adopted where this is appropriate to do so. Ensure recyclability definitions and data is presented in a consistent manner.
• Develop an external expert panel and work with ABF sustainability teams to share knowledge and learn.
• Evaluate external accreditations for future adoption and make recommendations to the business

Strategy Execution

• Develop and own a prioritised packaging roadmap—aligned to commitment on net zero and circularity, market trends, legislation updates and material specifications—driving a defined portfolio of changes through qualification and implementation to keep Twinings fit for the future.
• Lead and drive, via a programme management approach, cross-functional alignment between Procurement, Pack Engineering, Regulatory and Manufacturing teams to ensure that the roadmap is translated into tangible actions, with defined owners and timings, to deliver change.
• Accountable for turning sustainability strategy into implemented change in markets, ensuring initiatives are delivered on time and against defined success criteria.

Packaging Circularity & Net-Zero Initiatives:

• Partner Procurement by identifying, scoping out and making recommendations on specification changes that align with net zero ambitions and take ownership for ensuring the business has clarity on carbon impact from these opportunities.
• Define milestones to enable monitoring of progress towards published targets
• Ensure carbon, compliance and operational impacts are quantified and agreed prior to decision-making.

Legislation & Compliance
In collaboration with internal Regulatory team, and others:

• Support with the Monitoring and interpreting of evolving sustainability legislation, including but not limited to PPWR, EUDR, Net zero requirements.
• Assess the impact of regulations on packaging design, supply chain, and production and lead the communication of these requirements to the relevant stakeholders.
• Own & Lead the development of a packaging Sustainability Compliance roadmap and work with all relevant functions to implement the changes. Ensure regular review so this remains fit for purpose.
• Conduct horizon scanning in collaboration with Procurement teams, to 1) evaluate next steps for packaging categories and 2) ensure that future packaging initiatives are fit for purpose and mitigate against legislative and taxation risks.

Material development

• Partner with Supply Chain teams and suppliers to research new materials, clarify complexity, provide cost analysis and risk assessments to allow recommendations to be built.
• Lead Production and Pack Engineering team to ensure rationale for change is understood and to remove potential barriers for successful deployment. Ensure alignment is gained to agree testing plans, qualification timelines and own end to end delivery against agreed success criteria.
• Close collaboration with Packaging Exploration Lead to ensure that future packaging materials and specifications are in line with sustainability requirements. This will involve assessment of data, trends and legislation in order to present the most appropriate solutions to the business to enable sustainable growth.
• Identify opportunities for cost reduction of materials, in line with sustainability requirements, and ensure that these are fed into the action pipeline
• Technology Scouting: Collaborate with Procurement to identify new suppliers or harness new technologies to drive the packaging sustainability agenda forward. Ensuring that our supply base is fit for future sustainability demands.
• Provide technical assessment of new materials to Procurement teams to inform and build increased understanding.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

• FMCG change management background with the ability to understand barriers to change, influencing skills to unlock these barriers and comfortable operating in ambiguity.
• Proven track record in successful implementation of packaging sustainability projects from testing to qualification and then launch.
• Experience working with innovative and complex packaging solutions and future material development, including compostability requirements
• Extensive network and access to industry expertise in order to learn and inform
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a technical subject matter expert to influence without authority.
• Deep knowledge of packaging sustainability legislation, circular economy principles, and net-zero strategies.
• Strong analytical and evaluation skills with the ability to assess regulatory requirements from a technical packaging perspective and understand complex scenarios to provide clarity on necessary actions and decisions.
• Problem solving skills to understand, unlock and then communicate complex issues to allow fit for purpose solutions to be implemented.
• Exceptional communication and stakeholder management with the ability to engage, confidently challenge and build connectivity across disparate teams to enable decisions.
• Exceptional influencing skills to achieve alignment across functions and drive decisions towards tangible delivery
• Ability to work under pressure, managing multiple projects and driving delivery within fixed timelines.

Benefits

• Yearly bonus based on personal contribution and financial performance
• Flexible working options
• 25 days holiday plus 8 bank holidays and the option to buy and sell holidays
• Onsite Gym and Wellbeing Centre
• Perkbox – employee discount scheme with discounts online, in high street stores, cinema, holidays, restaurants and many more
• Pension scheme with your contributions matched for up to 10% of your salary
• Cycle to work scheme
• SimplyHealth Cash plan
• Onsite Staff shop and online staff discounts
• Bupa Private Medical Insurance
• Electric Car Scheme
• Access to LinkedIn Learning
• Access to ABF Networking, connect, collaborate, and grow across the ABF Group.

Twinings has become one of the world’s most renowned tea companies over its 300-year history because we never stop learning, never stop experimenting and never stop inventing. We take pride in our tea from bud to cup and have been working with some of our tea estates around the world since the early 18th Century.
More than 300 years later, the love of tea is still here - and so are we! We still sell tea from Thomas’s shop, and we still work hard to bring the most innovative new blends to tea lovers around the world. Now, we have over 500 varieties and our teas are cherished all over the world. Our expert master blenders taste more than 3,000 cups of tea every week. So you can be sure the next cup you taste will be every bit as good as the one yesterday or the day before.

Our approach to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion At TwiningsOvo, we believe in the power of diversity to drive innovation and meaningful work. We are committed to building a workplace where people from all backgrounds, identities, and experiences feel safe, valued, have a sense of belonging and are empowered to thrive. Inclusion is more than a goal, it’s how we work together every day. As an equal opportunity employer, we prohibit any unlawful discrimination against an applicant on the basis of their ethnicity, colour, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, family or parental status, disability, neurodiversity, age, socioeconomic background or any other status protected by law and are committed to promoting diversity across our workplace.

Applicants may be entitled to reasonable adjustments under the terms of the Equality Act. A reasonable adjustment is a change in the way things are typically done which will ensure an equal employment opportunity. Please inform our Talent Acquisition or HR Shared Services team if you need any assistance completing your application or to otherwise participate in the application process.