What 10 brands have adopted circular business models?
A circular business model aims to keep products and materials useful for longer through repair, reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and recycling. It also asks a commercial question: can a company earn revenue from maintaining what already exists, rather than relying only on the sale of new products?
The following 10 brands have introduced significant shifts in their product design processes, client service methods, and used merchandise recovery strategies. None of them achieves full circularity. Nevertheless, their journeys illustrate the potential of this methodology alongside the ongoing effort needed to curb waste and the reliance on virgin materials.
1. Patagonia: Repair and resale alongside new clothing
Patagonia’s Worn Wear program gives customers ways to trade in eligible clothing and buy used items. The company also offers repairs and publishes care guidance intended to extend garment life. These services make a jacket or pack valuable to the business beyond its first sale.
The most robust circular advantage occurs whenever a fixed or pre-owned article supplants the acquisition of a brand-new one. Nevertheless, transportation, laundering, and restoration continue to generate footprints; consequently, secondhand volume on its own fails to demonstrate a net ecological benefit.
2. IKEA: Furniture buyback, resale, and spare parts
IKEA has rolled out buyback services across participating regions, offering a pathway for eligible furniture to re-enter the market instead of heading to landfills. Its pre-owned selections and spare-parts provisions tackle a common dilemma: household items frequently get thrown away due to a missing piece, a relocation, or a shift in the owner’s lifestyle.
The commercial model evolves from a one-time furniture sale to a service that facilitates ownership transfers and extends product usability. Triumph relies on resilient engineering, cost-effective gathering and transit, and proof that used items replace the creation of brand-new goods.
3. Interface: Recovering and remaking commercial flooring
Interface designs modular carpet tiles that can be replaced individually, so an entire floor need not be removed when one area wears out. Through its ReEntry program, the company collects eligible used flooring for reuse, recycling, or other recovery routes. It also incorporates recycled materials into some products.
This merges circular product design with a return mechanism tailored for business clients. Such a distinction is crucial: whereas recycled materials decrease the need for certain virgin resources, retrieving flooring at the end of its lifecycle ensures those components remain accessible for subsequent manufacturing phases.
4. Michelin: Tire management and retreading
Michelin offers commercial fleets tire-management services in which performance and maintenance matter alongside the initial tire sale. Its retreading business gives suitable truck-tire casings another useful life by replacing worn tread rather than discarding the whole tire.
For fleet operators, longer tire life can lower replacement costs and vehicle downtime. For Michelin, it creates an ongoing service relationship. The environmental case must account for total tire life, fuel efficiency, and disposal; retreading alone does not address every impact associated with tire use.
5. Renault Group: Refurbishing vehicles and batteries
Renault Group has expanded beyond new-vehicle manufacturing through activities that include vehicle refurbishment, parts recovery, and work on used electric-vehicle batteries. Its industrial refurbishment operations aim to return products and components to use where feasible, while its wider recovery efforts seek value from vehicles at the end of their lives.
Reconditioned cars or parts can retain a significant portion of the resources initially put into their production. Repurposing batteries demands special attention: while a power unit might perform adequately in less rigorous scenarios, its overall health, security, and durability must be evaluated rather than taken for granted.
6. Philips: Refurbished medical equipment
Philips offers refurbished medical equipment, including selected imaging systems, as an alternative to buying new. Refurbishment can involve inspection, replacement of components, software updates, and testing before equipment returns to clinical use. Philips also works on service and equipment-life extension.
This represents a notable circular economy prospect since healthcare apparatuses often incorporate considerable amounts of resources and demand extensive work to produce. It also poses a tough challenge: any restored unit has to fulfill all relevant safety and functionality standards. Circularity must never compromise clinical dependability.
7. Fairphone: Phones designed for repair
Fairphone designs smartphones with replaceable components and sells spare parts so owners can carry out many repairs. Its approach pairs physical repairability with a commitment to extended software support, which is essential: a working phone offers limited value if its software becomes unusable or insecure.
Fairphone redefines the standard smartphone equation by positioning extended device lifespan as a core product attribute. Its overall impact hinges upon the duration users truly retain their handsets, alongside the ongoing feasibility and affordability of repairs.
8. Levi’s: Secondhand denim and alterations
Levi’s runs a pre-owned initiative for qualified used apparel, alongside offering repair and tailoring solutions via designated outlets. Resale grants pre-existing denim a second life with a new buyer, while adjustments enable owners to continue wearing pieces that require mending or no longer fit properly.
The model recognizes that durability is only useful when clothing stays in use. A returned garment may be perfectly wearable, but if it sits unsold—or if its buyer purchases the same amount of new clothing anyway—the benefit is smaller than the resale figures suggest.
9. Decathlon: Used sports gear and rental
Decathlon offers secondhand sporting goods, buyback or trade-in options, and rental services in participating markets. These routes suit equipment used for a short season, a new hobby, or a child who will soon outgrow it. Refurbishing an eligible bicycle for resale, for example, can give an expensive, material-intensive product another owner.
Rental arrangements can also allow multiple clients to share a single item sequentially. Whether this model lessens environmental strain hinges on how heavily it gets utilized; devices must experience enough demand to offset the logistical overhead, upkeep, and eventual substitution required.
10. Apple: Trade-in, refurbishment, and material recovery
Apple’s trade-in and certified refurbished programs give eligible devices paths into another period of use. For devices that cannot be reused, the company has developed disassembly processes, including its Daisy robot, to recover selected materials. Apple has also increased recycled content in parts of its product range.
These represent distinct stages rather than interchangeable assertions. Retaining a functional device in operation safeguards a greater portion of its production value compared to dismantling it for raw components. Although recycling stays vital whenever repurposing ceases to be feasible, it cannot single-handedly counterbalance the impacts of rapid upgrades.
What makes these changes meaningful?
The examples span several business models: repair and resale, design for longer life, product recovery, refurbishment, and services that reward maintenance. Their results should be judged by more than the number of items collected or the amount of recycled content in a new product. Useful measures include:
- How long products remain in active use, and how often they are repaired or passed to another owner.
- How much new production a reused or refurbished product actually replaces.
- Whether demand for virgin materials falls across the business, not just within one product line.
- The impacts of collection, transport, processing, and any additional purchases encouraged by the program.
These brands demonstrate how circularity can reshape a company’s offerings and its definition of value. Beyond simply providing a take-back program, the more profound evolution involves shaping an enterprise that thrives when items endure, transition smoothly among consumers, and demand fewer fresh resources as time goes on.
