Emma Burlow is one of the UK’s leading specialists on the circular economy and sustainability in business. She has worked directly with businesses on sustainability for 25 years and founded Lighthouse in 2020 to deliver impactful advice, coaching, and training. Emma assists boards and senior management teams to navigate the complex world of sustainability, from the SDGs and BCORP through carbon and Net Zero to materials and circular business models. Emma has a unique hands-on understanding of the sustainability challenges and opportunities for business. To amplify her impact, Emma delivers business-facing training in carbon literacy, sustainability, and the circular economy. She began to focus on carbon literacy as a tool to build capacity and empower employees in 2021, having led the team to deliver more than 50 courses and train over 700 learners to date. Emma has trained senior leadership teams from Beko PLC, KBR Inc., Crown Worldwide, Turley, Saba UK, and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Fund.
Emma is committed to increasing capacity in the training sector, as this is currently a bottleneck for supporting the population to access climate emergency training; hence, Lighthouse recently developed and certified a Carbon Literacy Train the Trainer course as well as a suite of shorter sustainability courses. In 2020, Emma started her #CE100 series, which profiles mainstream examples of circular business models. Her examples are always innovative, profitable, and accessible to all. Emma uses her rapidly growing network as a catalyst to create the change we need to meet future sustainability challenges.
Alongside her work at Lighthouse, Emma is Chief Sustainability Officer and Director of Revolution-ZERO. She is also part of the Special Advisory Group for the National Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Research Program.