Blake Gordon
Sustainability & Commercial Strategy | Where Sustainability Drives Profit, Not Tradeoffs | Fast Company World Changing Ideas 2025
- Role
- General Manager - Digital Trading at Georgia-Pacific LLC
- Location
- Atlanta, GA, US
- LinkedIn followers
- 500 followers
About Blake Gordon
Nine of the ten roles I’ve held in my career didn’t exist before I stepped into them. They emerged from problems that needed solving, before there was a defined role to match. I’ve never followed a playbook. I’ve had to write one every time. That’s shaped how I think about work: start with the problem, figure out what’s actually needed, and build toward that—whether or not there’s an org chart that supports it yet. I\'ve built my career on building new things and on understanding why people make the decisions they do. I\'m drawn to the behavioral economics behind how customers buy, how organizations change and how hearts and minds actually shift. That curiosity shapes everything, including how I work with customers and how I lead my team. Leading with empathy isn\'t a soft skill to me. It\'s how you figure out what someone actually needs, and it\'s how you earn their trust. At Georgia-Pacific Recycling, that looks like building hubbIT from the ground up, an online marketplace designed to open commercial recycling to businesses that have historically been shut out of the system. Before hubbIT, selling recyclable paper, plastic or scrap metal meant navigating an opaque, invitation-only process. We changed that. Today, any business can access real-time pricing on 50+ grades of recyclables, 24/7. In our first 18 months, we improved supplier bottom lines by more than $1 million collectively and diverted over 22 million pounds of materials from landfills. That outcome matters beyond our business. What we really did was get people to think about materials differently, not as waste to manage, but as value waiting to be unlocked. That reframe is what I want to bring to sustainability more broadly. Too many organizations treat it as a cost center, a compliance checkbox, or a line item someone has to defend in a budget meeting. The companies that treat it as a business asset instead will look back and wonder why it took so long. What we proved in recycling is repeatable, scalable, and works in any industry willing to ask a different question. Outside of work I\'m a proud girl-dad to two of the strongest women this world will ever see. I take barbecue unreasonably seriously, which my neighbors appreciate and my waistline does not. The Atlanta Falcons, Auburn and GT have made me an expert in something called foolish optimism. I keep showing up battered and bruised, convinced this is our year. It never is. I\'m always happy to connect about what\'s changing in recycling and sustainability, or what it looks like to build something new inside a 50-year-old industry.
Experience
General Manager - Digital Trading
Jun 2023 — Present · Atlanta, GA, US
I lead Growth Strategies for one of the world\'s largest recycled materials operations. Specifically, that\'s leading Marketing, Customer Experience, Change Management, New Business Development and Digital Trading. One of my current focuses is hubbIT, a platform we built from scratch to open the recycling marketplace to businesses that have historically been locked out.• Identified a problem the industry had accepted as normal, built hubbIT in 6 months, and scaled to 2500+ users in 18 months• $1M+ added to supplier bottom lines; 22M+ lbs of recyclables diverted from landfills to date• Fast Company World Changing Ideas 2025 | Gold Stevie Award for Sustainability | Max Innovation Award, Georgia State University• Industry conference speaker on recycling, circular economy and digital market transformation
Education
Auburn University
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Industrial Design
2003 — 2008
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Executive Education - Mastering Design Thinking
2019 — 2019
Georgia Institute of Technology
Master of Business Administration - MBA, Management of Technology
2020 — 2021
Skills
- Excel
- Strategic Planning
- 3d Rendering
- Manufacturing
- Research Design
- Powerpoint
- Microsoft Excel
- Ideation
- Fabrication
- Competitive Analysis
- Solidworks
- Project Management
- Design Methodology
- Graphics
- Rhino
- Product Design
- Drawing
- Photography
- Rhino 3d
- Business Strategy
- Management
- Modeling
- Adobe Creative Suite
- Model Making
- Product Development
- Indesign
- Product Engineering
- Testing
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- Concept Development
- Injection Molding
- Sketching
- Rapid Prototyping
- Industrial Design
- Technical Drawing
- Leadership
- Prototyping
- Word
- Business Development
Find verified contacts for anyone on LinkedIn
Unifers gives sales teams verified emails and direct dials, enriched profiles, and outreach that lands in the inbox.
Free plan included · No credit card required
This profile is compiled from publicly available professional sources. Unifers is not affiliated with or endorsed by LinkedIn. Request removal of this profile.