Stewards Magazine

Weinberg Fellowship Gave Seeba a Career Boost 

As the director of environmental sustainability at Georgia-Pacific, University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) graduate Nagapooja Seeba (MS ’11) helps the company understand and improve the environmental impacts of its products, facilities, and mills.

This includes managing environmental data, such as scope one, scope two, and scope three emissions; conducting life cycle assessments (LCAs); and working with external organizations, such as the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment, of which she is a board member, to meet the company’s stewardship vision. 

Seeba made the leap to Georgia-Pacific, a forest products manufacturer based in Atlanta, in 2021 after holding key sustainability leadership positions at the Whirlpool Corporation in Benton Harbor, Michigan. In her nine years at Whirlpool, Seeba worked her way up the corporate ladder, starting as a project engineer focused on product sustainability and ending her tenure as the manager of sustainable materials and supplier diversity.

“I started as a sustainability engineer, and my main role was to do life cycle assessments for our appliances and certify them according to sustainability standards,” Seeba said. “It gave me a really good understanding of the important factors that moved the needle on sustainability for our products.”

Becoming a sustainability leader

That experience led Seeba to develop a global program at Whirlpool, which used the knowledge gained from sustainability standards and LCAs to modify Whirlpool’s design tools and manufacturing processes to create more sustainable product offerings.

“Before this program began, sustainability was something we talked about after the product was already made,” Seeba noted. “It was not something we thought about while planning for that product. Through this program, we started integrating sustainability into early planning discussions all the way through the entire architecture of the product.

“It gave us an opportunity to really think about solutions that are holistic and would work for everyone, but at the same time have built-in flexibility in them so that they can change and be used appropriately for each region throughout the United States and globally.”

Because Seeba worked with all departments at Whirlpool to deploy the program, she gained valuable skills in change management that didn’t go unnoticed by leadership. As a result, Seeba was offered a role in procurement to develop and lead the Sustainable Sourcing and the Supplier Diversity programs. 

“I worked closely with the chief procurement officer, and we made some changes that had a huge sustainability impact, such as restricting our use of certain chemicals that were really harmful and shifting to other suppliers that didn’t use those chemicals,” Seeba said. “We also started using more diverse suppliers, including local suppliers in the Benton Harbor area that could fulfill some of our smaller procurement needs.”

The ability to diversify at Whirlpool and learn different parts of the business helped Seeba realize she was ready for a career change that involved more responsibility. She was drawn to Georgia-Pacific because it offered new challenges, particularly the opportunity to broaden her sustainability knowledge in another industry.

“The issues are so different based on the product you’re dealing with,” Seeba said. “What I liked about Georgia-Pacific was that it was a completely new industry with new environmental concerns. There is also encouragement at Georgia-Pacific to improvise on your role based on one’s own talent and interests. You can add on new responsibilities and really explore new things. And that focus on self-entrepreneurship is not just for leaders, but for every employee.”

An important career step

Seeba’s interest in sustainable systems began with her undergraduate degree in biotechnology engineering from Anna University, Chennai in her home country of India. Seeba discovered through an internship that while she didn’t enjoy working in a lab, she liked other aspects of her field, such as its focus on sustainability, including biofuels and bioremediation. 

She began researching master’s degrees in sustainable systems. SEAS stood out because it offered a well-rounded program that incorporated other disciplines. “It had interdisciplinarity baked into the program,” Seeba noted, “which is how sustainability is in real life.”

It was a big step for Seeba to leave India for graduate school in the United States, a place she had never visited before and where she lived on her own for the first time. She found U-M to be a welcoming and supportive environment, and has fond memories of bonding with her professors at orientation and traveling to Kenya for her master’s project, which focused on developing sustainable water and energy options for a local ranch.

Seeba is especially grateful for the Marshall Weinberg Fellowship she was awarded from SEAS, which helped launch her career at Steelcase Inc., a company that manufactures furniture for offices, hospitals and classrooms. Steelcase had a summer internship for someone with an LCA background, and Seeba fit the bill because of the experience she had gained through her master’s project and thesis.

“Steelcase was such an important step in my career,” she said. “As an international student, I needed an H1B visa to work, and to get that visa requirement after graduating was difficult. Because U-M was sponsoring me, I was able to get my foot in the door at Steelcase, where I did LCAs and EPDs (environmental product declarations) for furniture products. That led to my role at Whirlpool. We still do EPDs for Georgia-Pacific products, so I continue to use the learnings from Steelcase in my current job.”

If there’s one piece of advice Seeba would offer future sustainability leaders, it’s to broaden their sustainability knowledge, just as she has done professionally. 

“From a career perspective, as wide your experience is, that’s how much of a better leader you will be,” said Seeba. “Really focus on trying to diversify your experience in different parts of the company and in different parts of the industry. You’ll gain a greater perspective, and that perspective will be very valuable as you become a sustainability leader.”