Early Foundations
Circularity is in Brooke Donnelly’s blood. Long before it became a boardroom priority or policy imperative, she experienced it firsthand in her family’s industrial packaging and recycling business. There she learned how materials move through the economy, where value is retained, where it is lost and how difficult it can be to keep resources in productive use.
That experience shaped a career spent working across industry, government and retail to turn circular economy ambition into practical implementation.
Industry Leadership
At Visy Industrial Packaging, Brooke Donnelly led initiatives that brought together commercial performance and sustainability outcomes across complex packaging value chains. Her experience spanning manufacturing, recycling and customer partnerships provided a strong foundation for her later work driving national collaboration on packaging stewardship, circular economy policy and sustainable business transformation.
National Impact
As CEO of the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation (APCO), she brought government and industry together to accelerate action on sustainable packaging and product stewardship. During her tenure, Brooke helped drive the development of Australia’s first national packaging targets, expand adoption of the Australasian Recycling Label and launch the ANZPAC Plastics Pact — the first regional plastics pact in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s global network.
Her later role as General Manager Sustainability at Coles Group provided another vantage point: inside one of Australia’s largest retailers, where decisions about packaging, procurement, supply chains, infrastructure and sustainability must work at enormous scale and deliver value for customers as well as the environment.
Thought Leadership
Her broader contribution to Australia’s innovation conversation has also included contributing to Australia’s Nobel Laureates Volume III – State of Our Innovation Nation 2020 and Beyond.
Vision and Approach
Across these roles, one lesson has remained constant: the biggest challenges sit between organisations, across supply chains, infrastructure, regulation and markets. That is also where some of the greatest opportunities to improve productivity, affordability, resilience and domestic capability can be found.
This thinking sits behind Catalyst. Brooke brings government, retailers, brands, manufacturers, recyclers, investors and other parts of the value chain to the same table. The focus is practical: build solutions that make commercial sense, can operate at scale and create stronger, more resilient and resource-secure supply chains.
For Brooke, circularity is not simply about managing waste better. It is about redesigning the systems that determine how value, materials and capability are retained in the economy.