Circular Systems Growth Portfolio Lead
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AI Summary
Lead the global circular systems practice by setting the strategic vision and growing the business portfolio. Design and scale pilots, prove commercial value for resource recovery, and build infrastructure for circular supply chains.
Circular Systems Growth Portfolio Lead
Department: Circ. & Value Chain Trans. : Advisory
Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time
Location: Flexible
Description
We're looking for a leader who understands where circular systems are heading and wants the platform to shape what comes next.
This isn't a role focused on producing strategies alone. You'll help clients design pilots, prove commercial value, build infrastructure, unlock investment and scale solutions that work.
You'll set the direction for a global practice, grow a significant business, and help some of the world's leading organisations turn circularity into a value system.
Anthesis is a platform to multiply your impact.
We're looking for a builder. Someone who has spent their career in the engine room of the circular economy — working on waste systems, material loops, resource recovery, the criticality/circularity nexus, food waste reduction and valorization, reverse supply chains, urban mining, critical minerals, secondary material markets, circular business models and infrastructure — and is ready to build a global practice around it.
This isn't a role focused on producing strategies alone. You'll help clients design pilots, prove commercial value, build infrastructure, unlock investment and scale solutions that work.
You'll set the direction for a global practice, grow a significant business, and help some of the world's leading organisations turn circularity into a value system.
Anthesis is a platform to multiply your impact.
We're looking for a builder. Someone who has spent their career in the engine room of the circular economy — working on waste systems, material loops, resource recovery, the criticality/circularity nexus, food waste reduction and valorization, reverse supply chains, urban mining, critical minerals, secondary material markets, circular business models and infrastructure — and is ready to build a global practice around it.
You'll take ownership of a portfolio that already has real scale, real clients, and a market that's accelerating. Your job is to set the direction, grow the business, and make Anthesis the firm that defines what's next in circular systems — not just advising, but designing pilots, deploying cutting-edge technologies, proving the economics and the investment case, and helping clients scale what works.
If you're the kind of person who looks at a broken material flow and sees untapped value — who gets excited by critical minerals recovery, robotic disassembly, and AI-powered sorting — and then actually builds the pilot, proves the ROI, and scales it — keep reading.
Why This Role Exists
Circular systems are undergoing a structural shift. The focus is moving beyond waste diversion as a sustainability goal, toward critical minerals recovery, reverse supply chains, secondary material markets, and value optimisation — driven by geopolitical risk, policy acceleration, and corporate demand for resilient supply. Recovery technologies are moving from pilot to deployment and circularity is becoming a cornerstone of smart industrial strategy.
Our clients — across consumer goods, manufacturing, built environment, food, retail, tech, and public sector — are trying to navigate this shift. Some need deep technical guidance, some need strategy, and others need execution. Increasingly, they need all three.
We’ve built strong foundations. Now we need a leader to scale this into a defining global practice — someone who understands circular systems and the full reverse value chain and can translate that into commercial growth and client impact.
Key Responsibilities
This role spans several dimensions. You'll be stronger in some than others, but you should have the appetite and the capability to lead across all of them:
- Set the vision, own the strategy. Craft a compelling, forward-looking global vision for circular systems and resource recovery that spans the full reverse value chain — grounded in where clients are heading, where policy is moving, where technology is maturing, and where Anthesis can lead. Define what winning looks like: which solutions, technologies, and partnerships to scale, which to incubate, which to evolve — and rally the organisation behind it. Translate that into a multi-year growth plan with clear milestones, investment priorities, and measurable outcomes.
- Navigate the landscape. Maintain a deep, continuously updated understanding of the geopolitical, regulatory, and market forces shaping circular systems across geographies — and how those converging forces are reshaping what circular systems need to deliver. Translate that complexity into clear, actionable strategic options, bring in the right teams to quantify the impact, and lay out the path forward for clients' operations.
- Know our client's world. Build a deep, ongoing understanding of what your clients are facing across sectors — infrastructure constraints, material economics, operational complexity, cost pressures — and the commercial opportunities that sit inside that complexity. Be the partner who sees what's coming and helps them get ahead of it. Position Anthesis as more than an advisor: the partner that truly understands the client's operational reality and helps them win.
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Go beyond decks — build, test, scale. We don't hand clients a strategy and walk away. We get into the trenches and go the full distance — helping them innovate, test, learn, and execute, from first concept to operating at scale. Design and run pilots that prove new approaches — reuse systems, reformulated products, new packaging formats, circular business models — partner with specialist teams to build the business cases and ROI models that give executives the confidence to invest, then help operationalize and scale what works. Harness AI, digital tools, and emerging technology to deliver faster, sharper, and more cost-effective. Scale what works. Kill what doesn't.
- Build infrastructure, strengthen secondary markets. Identify and pursue opportunities to design and develop regional recovery hubs, reverse supply-chain infrastructure, and processing capacity — including critical minerals recovery from e-waste, industrial, and post-consumer streams. Build the commercial architecture that makes recovered materials flow back into manufacturing — feedstock aggregation, quality standards, off-take agreements, demand signaling, attribute certification — and the coalitions that connect producers, processors, municipalities, OEMs, and end-markets into functioning circular supply chains. Develop Anthesis's edge in material and asset valorization: maximising residual value at end-of-commercial-use and helping clients decide between reuse, remanufacture, and recovery on real economic data.
- Grow the business. Own the revenue targets, pipeline, and forecasting for the portfolio — and grow it materially. Shift the model from pure advisory toward digitally enabled managed services, embedded operations, pilot programmes, and recurring revenue. Innovate on pricing — value-based, outcome-linked, reflecting the tangible impact of this work. Strengthen the value story. Improve margins.
- Connect across the organisation. Work across Anthesis business lines, geographies, and sector teams to unlock client value that wouldn't exist in silos. Spot the adjacencies: when a resource recovery conversation surfaces a product design question, a regulatory need, or a supply chain opportunity, connect the client to the right capability — including your counterpart's portfolio. Partner with the other Growth Portfolio Leads and senior leadership on cross-cutting strategy, AI, and go-to-market.
- Build and lead a high-performing team. Lead a diverse group of senior technical experts — strong opinions, different working styles — and unify them around a shared direction without relying on hierarchy. Build on the team's deep technical strength by adding commercial and emerging-tech depth as the practice grows, so every addition raises the bar. Lead through change with directness, empathy, and respect — making the hard calls when they're needed, and bringing people with you.
- Represent Anthesis at the highest level. Be the senior external face of Anthesis's circular systems and resource recovery capability — at industry forums, in policy discussions, at coalition convenings, in client boardrooms. Build the kind of trusted relationships where you're the first call when the big strategic decisions get made. Elevate conversations beyond the immediate brief, and help clients think bigger than they would alone.
Technical Scope & Domains
This is a highly technical leadership role requiring fluency to engage with waste engineers, municipal planners, supply chain directors, and CFOs.
Domains You Will Own:
- Waste & Resource Management: Collection systems, sorting infrastructure, material recovery, waste hierarchy application, cost modelling, and operational optimization.
- Urban Mining & Critical Minerals: Recovery of strategic materials (lithium, cobalt, rare earths, copper) from e-waste and industrial streams, aligned with geopolitical and OEM drivers.
- Food Loss & Waste: Prevention hierarchies, redistribution systems, valorization technologies, and transforming food waste from a cost center into a value stream.
- Recovery & Recycling Technology: Commercial application of technology including advanced chemical/mechanical recycling and investment pathways for scale
- Reverse Supply Chains: End-to-end system design for moving post-use products from consumers back to processors and manufacturers (aggregation, sorting, reintroduction).
- Secondary Markets & Circular Procurement: Demand signaling, price dynamics, off-take agreements, quality standards, and environmental attribute certifications.
- Asset Valorization: Maximizing residual value across the hierarchy (reuse first, remanufacture second, recycle third) based on robust economic data.
- Circular Business Models: Commercializing and scaling product-as-a-service, sharing platforms, and remanufacturing systems.
- Reuse & Refill Systems: Designing the operating models, reverse logistics, ecosytem structures, and unit economics that make reuse and refill systems run and scale. (The product and packaging design that makes reuse possible sits with Sustainable Products & Packaging — your counterpart's portfolio.)Industrial Symbiosis: Designing regional ecosystems for cross-sector material exchange and by-product valorization.
- Waste Policy & Regulation: Landfill diversion, recycled content mandates, deposit return schemes, and multi-jurisdictional critical raw materials policies.
- Systems Modelling: Material flow analysis (MFA), leakage identification, infrastructure scenario planning, and investment readiness.
- Business Case & Financial Modelling: Structuring compelling ROI frameworks and presenting financial outputs that give senior executives confidence to invest.
Domains You Will Collaborate On:
- LCA, Carbon Footprinting & Impact Measurement: Owned by Impact Intelligence — brought in to substantiate circular claims and justify client investments.
- Product & Packaging Design: Owned by Sustainable Products & Packaging counterpart — connecting end-of-life realities to initial product design.
- Supply Chain Transparency & Responsible Sourcing: Owned by Value Chain Transformation — driving the visibility needed for reliable circular systems.
- Green Claims & Substantiation: Owned by Impact Intelligence — mitigating risks regarding closed-loop claims and recovered content.
Skills, Knowledge & Expertise
10+ years in sustainability consulting or industry, with deep domain expertise.
- Background in professional services/consulting (understanding utilization, margins, and practice growth).
- Established industry network bringing immediate credibility and access to doors.
- Master’s degree or MBA preferred.
- Languages: Fluent English required; an additional European language is preferred.
- Global Flexibility: Willingness to travel for client and leadership engagements.
Job Benefits
Why Anthesis? Build and lead a global practice in one of the fastest-moving areas of sustainability. Take ownership of a portfolio with real scale, world-class clients, and a mandate to grow it significantly. Work alongside a talented, mission-driven team that takes the work seriously and each other kindly. Join a consultancy that’s growing fast, investing in AI and innovation, and thinking long-term. Have the autonomy to set a vision, make bold bets, and see them through.
- Work within a highly motivated team in an innovative and rapidly growing global company
- Opportunity to have a direct impact and be a key part of the growth and development of the business and the team
- Work solely on projects that have an impact on the sustainability and climate change goals/challenges for clients
- Opportunity to work with, collaborate with and learn from sustainability SME’s who are passionate about the work they do and the impact Anthesis can have
- Exposure to a wide range of clients and projects on a global basis
- Competitive salary in line with, experience and skills
- Competitive benefits including flexible working, 25 days holiday and two volunteering days off and the day off for your Birthday!
- An opportunity to participate in the Anthesis Employee Participation Plan (EPP), an industry-pioneering employee incentive plan that allows all employees to be rewarded for the growth in the equity value of Anthesis.
- Cooperative, supportive and open working atmosphere.
We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and encourage applications from all backgrounds.
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