Caroline James DeLoach
Caroline is an authority on and voice for a societal shift towards a circular materials economy. She is now Atlantic Packaging’s first Director of Sustainability, where she assists companies in transitioning to more sustainable packaging and helps them weigh the sustainability and business tradeoffs required to pursue a more circular economy for packaging.
Her expertise in recyclability, compostability, life cycle assessment, consumer behavior, and closed-loop systems helps companies across all industries find ways to improve their packaging’s impact on the environment.
Originally from Atlanta, Caroline admits to being a child who was obsessed with trash after seeing a video in her fourth-grade science class about landfills. She became fascinated by the concept and inefficiency of waste and quickly became concerned with the threat of climate change on the world’s most vulnerable people and ecosystems.
Caroline attended Georgetown University for her bachelor’s degree, where she was a founding member of the student-run campaign to divest Georgetown’s endowment from fossil fuels. After graduating, Caroline provided consulting for federal government agencies in Washington D.C., where she worked in the intelligence community and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Realizing she wanted improving businesses’ sustainability to be her full-time job, Caroline pursued an MBA at Yale School of Management, where she undertook much of her coursework at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE). While at Yale, Caroline dove further into industrial ecology, the science behind the circular economy. Her analysis into packaging life cycle assessments earned her YSE’s annual award in industrial ecology research.
Caroline loves translating science and research into principles for action toward real circularity, and she also connects the need for circularity to the urgency of climate action. Her work has been featured in GreenBiz, Packaging Dive, Authority Magazine, and various sustainability podcasts.