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Allison Lin, Global Vice President of Packaging Sustainability, Mars, Inc.

Allison Lin shares her experiences and insights on driving sustainability. Find out how she overcame challenges and why diverse perspectives are critical to solving global packaging waste.

Allison Lin

Tell us about your background and how you got into the packaging industry.

When I interned on Wall Street at Merrill Lynch, I quickly realized that it wasn’t the right career path for me. Luckily, Procter & Gamble was recruiting on campus, and I entered the world of packaging, which I knew nothing about at the time. At P&G, I was asked to lead their global recycled and bio-based plastics sourcing strategy, and I fell in love with the field of sustainable packaging.

I eventually went to Starbucks, where I got to experience the fiber side of the packaging business, and Coca-Cola, where I led development of the World Without Waste sourcing strategy for closures, labels, and films. Most recently, I then spent two years on the converter side of the business to get a different perspective leading corporate sustainability for both healthcare and consumer products at Westfall-Technik before coming back to the brand owner side at Mars in 2021.

What is the most rewarding part of your job today?

I love knowing that what I’m doing is positively impacting the environment and being able to see our innovations on shelves or used by consumers.

It’s a great privilege to work at Mars, where it is investing hundreds of millions of dollars to reimagine and redesign more than 12,000 packaging across its diverse portfolio. Today, almost half of our packaging portfolio is undergoing redesign or elimination to be more sustainable. 

To be part of such a progressive and ambitious sustainable packaging program at Mars, I feel both a tremendous amount of excitement and responsibility to deliver the results, especially knowing how much of a positive environmental impact it can bring to the world for us and future generations.

It’s also great to work for a company that does sustainability differently. Mars is holding itself accountable by embedding its packaging targets into how it measures overall business success. The company’s top 300 executives now have remuneration linked to delivering against the packaging targets. 

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