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 initiative provides buyers with opportunities to return qualifying apparel and purchase pre-owned goods. Furthermore, the firm delivers repair services alongside maintenance advice designed to prolong the lifespan of each garment. Through these offerings, items like a jacket or backpack retain corporate value long after the initial transaction takes place.
The strongest circular benefit comes when a repaired or secondhand item replaces a new purchase. Shipping, cleaning, and repair still have impacts, however, so resale volume alone does not prove an overall environmental gain.
2. IKEA: Furniture buyback, resale, and spare parts
IKEA has introduced buyback services in participating markets, giving eligible furniture a route back into resale rather than disposal. Its secondhand offerings and spare-parts services address a practical problem: furniture is often discarded because a component is missing, a household moves, or an item no longer fits its owner’s needs.
The business-model shift is from selling furniture only once to helping it pass between owners and remain usable. Success depends on durable design, affordable collection and transport, and evidence that secondhand purchases displace new production.
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 combines circular product design with a return system for commercial customers. The distinction matters: recycled content reduces demand for some virgin inputs, while recovering flooring at the end of use helps keep materials available for another production cycle.
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, extending tire durability can reduce both vehicle downtime and replacement expenses. For Michelin, this fosters a continuous service connection. Ecological evaluations must factor in complete tire longevity, fuel economy, and recycling; simply applying retreads does not resolve all environmental consequences linked to tire utilization.
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.
A refurbished vehicle or component can preserve much of the value already invested in manufacturing it. Battery reuse requires particular care: a battery suitable for a less demanding application may still be useful, but its condition, safety, and remaining life must be assessed rather than assumed.
6. Philips: Refurbished medical equipment
Philips provides pre-owned medical hardware, encompassing chosen diagnostic imaging devices, as a viable alternative to purchasing brand-new units. Such restorative processes generally entail thorough evaluations, part swaps, software upgrades, and rigorous testing phases prior to releasing the machinery back into clinical environments. Furthermore, Philips focuses on maintenance solutions and maximizing the operational lifespan of medical apparatuses.
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 engineers mobile devices featuring swappable modules and commercializes replacement components, empowering users to perform numerous fixes themselves. This strategy couples hardware serviceability with a dedication to long-term firmware updates—a crucial factor, seeing as a functional handset loses its worth once its operating system grows obsolete or vulnerable.
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 operates a secondhand program for eligible used garments and offers repair and alteration services through selected locations. Resale gives existing jeans another customer; alterations can help an owner keep wearing a pair that no longer fits or needs mending.
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.
Why do these modifications carry significance?
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:
- The duration items stay in active service, alongside the frequency with which they undergo repair or change hands.
- The extent to which a recycled or restored good genuinely offsets the creation of new inventory.
- Whether the enterprise experiences a drop in virgin material demand enterprise-wide, rather than within a single product category alone.
- The environmental footprint stemming from collection, transit, processing, and extra acquisitions stimulated by the initiative.
These brands show that circularity can change what a company sells and what it considers valuable. The deeper transformation is not simply offering a take-back scheme; it is building a business that benefits when products last, move efficiently between users, and require fewer new resources over time.
