Sustainability Manager

The Vacancy

We have an exciting opportunity for an individual to join us and play a key role in driving Wates’ resource efficiency targets by engaging with individual business units, bid-, design-, and project teams, as well as procurement managers, supply chain partners and the wider SHEQ and sustainability team. Your experience may be from any discipline that has worked within or across the value chain to tackle resource efficiency and waste challenges in the built environment. This role will allow you to excel in liberating your technical expertise to realise efficiencies and deliver opportunities, that will eradicate waste from our projects, whilst sustaining our compliance with UK legislation and standards.

Reporting to the Wates Property Services Head of SHEQ, this role will support the implementation of our new Environmental Sustainability Plan’s resource efficiency theme ambitions, by working with our project teams and procurement managers to drive resource hierarchy led outcomes across our business.

You will have ownership for business processes relating to resource efficiency and for supporting strategic tenders and bids in these disciplines. This will involve providing technical support, as well as performance data analysis, where required. The role will work closely with our IT and Data Analytics team to automate performance reporting on our progress.

The role will analyse, evaluate, identify, and deliver key areas for improvement, develop KPIs to track performance and drive material sustainable outcomes.

Key Accountabilities for the role include:

• Lead on the engagement with business units on resource efficiency related projects, trials and programmes, with a particular focus on materials reuse, recycling, recovery, and avoidance of waste. Undertake site visits to provide advice and guidance to project teams.

• Drive the practical adoption of resource efficient solutions by working collaboratively with our design consultants and procurement teams, as well as our supply chain partners across the value chain.

• Develop a resource efficiency strategy to deliver the hierarchy ambitions, as well as sustain waste Duty of Care compliance, working with our waste and logistics partners

• Develop performance metrics for managing progress against our resource efficiency targets and automate reporting across the hierarchy interfaces.

• Develop processes and systems for projects to drive resource efficient outcomes to optimise reuse and meet 2045 zero waste ambitions.

• Represent the business on key industry forums and other relevant external platforms, ensuring Wates remains at the leading edge of resource efficiency and circular economy platform.

• Provide technical expertise on materials recovery, resource efficiency approaches and waste legislation to inform current and future strategic direction.

• Develop collateral for large tenders on resource efficiency and waste performance related topics.

• Update the business on key legal and policy changes on circular economy, resource efficiency and waste-related topics.

• Be a flexible and multi-disciplinary member of the Group Environment team, assisting colleagues with work relating to other key issues, such as carbon & energy, waste & resource efficiency, and water & nutrient neutrality, as well as compliance to protect the built and natural environment.

We are looking for you to have a good knowledge of sustainability impacts on and from the environment, within the built environment, construction and property services (incl retrofit and refurb) sectors, and expert knowledge of waste legislation, resource efficiency, and modern methods of construction solutions. Good knowledge of international standards, such as ISO 14001:2015 and ISO2400 and circular economy, are desirable. Experience of procurement processes, familiarity of the supplier market and what solutions can be readily deployed would be ideal. We would want you to understand UK policy, environmental legislation, regulatory frameworks, technical standards, and experience in briefing senior managers on changes in legislation or policy and how these might affect their areas of work.

To be successful in this role you will be post-graduate degree qualified in Environmental Science or Management (or equivalent) and a professional Member of a relevant Society for the Environment body (e.g. CIWM, IEMA etc) with preference given to Chartered Environmentalist (CEnv) candidates. You will also have excellent presentation, facilitation and communication skills, and the ability to produce communication materials and campaigns that will drive sustainable outcomes. You will have excellent influencing skills and be able to explain complex information to enable key stakeholders to act. Strong analytical skills with good attention to detail are essential.

This role can be based out of one of our offices Nationwide.

Work for Wates

Wates is one of the UK’s leading family-owned development, building and property maintenance companies.  Founded over 125 years ago, we have a proud legacy in the built environment.

We are driven by our purpose, ‘reimagining places for people to thrive’ and our three promises:

• Thriving places – working with customers, partners and communities to create places that are more sustainable, inclusive, and full of opportunity.
• Thriving planet – protecting nature and taking action on climate change by collaborating and innovating with our partners.
• Thriving people – creating opportunities and relationships so that everyone who works for and with us feels included, invested in and treated with care.

We are proud to be recognised as Gold Investors in People and as a Disability Confident employer.  We also ensure that our recruitment processes do not treat anyone less favourably due to an offending background.