Recycling for Change
Haley Lowry, MBA ’13, directs global sustainability at Dow.
Haley Lowry has a mission to turn trash into cash.
As the director of global sustainability at Dow, Lowry leads initiatives to remove plastic waste from the environment at one of the world’s largest producers of plastics and hydrocarbons.
From her Houston base, she helps businesses and communities transform their economies from linear take, make, and dispose models to circular models, where waste gets remade.
“In the circular economy we believe trash is not waste, it’s a resource,” Lowry says. “It becomes a part of products that are made and sold in the future.”
Reducing packaging waste is one of Lowry’s priorities. “If you recycle plastic packaging, then it can be remade into the same material and reused,” she says. Lowry has also spearheaded efforts to help retailers repackage fresh produce to extend shelf life.
Her work shaping Dow’s sustainability strategy takes her around the world, managing teams in Latin America, Africa, and Asia — places that produce most of the world’s plastic refuse.
Mississippi raised, Lowery has a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Clemson University. She started working at Dow in 2005 and has steered her career to make a global impact. After taking a leadership course at Harvard University in 2017, she told her boss she wanted to use her business influence at Dow to solve social and environmental problems.
Lowry’s passion project, Recycling for Change, is one way she’s doing that. The Dow-funded initiative helps waste pickers in São Paulo, Brazil, earn money by collecting and sorting plastic from landfills. “We take the material they gather, improve it through technology, and sell it back into the marketplace as recycled plastic,” Lowry explains. The partnership creates local jobs, livable wages, and infrastructure for efficient waste management in underdeveloped Brazil. Lowry calls it a triple bottom line. “It’s good for Dow’s business, good for society, and good for the environment.”
In March 2021, Lowry was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, one of 112 people selected worldwide. She earned the honor for her big-picture thinking. “It’s not just about businesses making money anymore,” she says. “Businesses will also be judged on their social and environmental impact.” Companies do have a fiduciary responsibility to investors and shareholders, she acknowledges, “but stakeholders, the communities where companies operate, matter.”
Story by Gretchen M. Sanders
This article appeared in the spring 2022 issue of McCombs magazine. Click on the link to see the full issue.
