Circularity as a Business Case ♻️
Circularity has shifted from buzzword to boardroom priority. The pressure is real: cut costs, stay compliant, and prove value — all while rethinking ownership, incentives, and end-of-life models. Easy to talk about, hard to pull off.
That’s why we sat down with members and experts from Unity Consulting & Innovation to trade notes on what’s working in practice. The session brought out hard lessons, useful tools, and clear examples of where companies hit walls when trying to move circularity from talk to action. Here’s a summary of the key insights—and a few tools you can put to use yourself.
Six takeaways you can act on:
1. Anchor at the top, fix incentives at the edge
Circularity won’t stick without both. It takes visible executive backing and sales incentives that reward uptime, take-back, and reuse — not just new unit volume. Otherwise, the business model stalls.
2. Use the Narrow–Slow–Close model
Think in levers, not slogans: cut material and energy use (Narrow), extend life through repair, refurb, or service models (Slow), and loop materials back into use (Close). Then align the business model with the technical intent.
3. Kill the “green premium” pitch
Most buyers won’t pay more just because it’s greener. What lands is clear value: uptime guarantees, lower total cost of ownership, supply-chain resilience. Some leaders also quantify the cost of inaction alongside ROI to make the case stick.
4. Bring end-of-life out of the black box
Traceability unlocks real KPIs: take-back rates, share of reused components, secondary material content. Digital Product Passports will make this easier over time, but the work starts now with suppliers and recyclers.
5. Treat compliance as a profit lever
New rules on PFAS, batteries, ESPR, WEEE, and more aren’t just paperwork. Used well, they help de-risk supply chains, avoid penalties, and justify design changes that make circular economics viable.
6. Match ambition to maturity
Unity’s maturity ladder (Reactive → Proactive → Transformer) is a useful check. Build governance and data before rolling out complex take-back or product-as-a-service offers. Don’t jump steps.
What’s on sustainability leaders' mind about circularity?
In our session, members shared what’s top of mind when it comes to circularity. Here’s a snapshot of the themes they see as most relevant 💡
Do you agree with these priorities? What’s missing from your perspective?
Just hit reply. We’d love to hear your take.
Real examples shared in the session
- Industrial machinery supplier: shifting from selling units to selling outcomes. They built a product-as-a-service pathway by modeling total cost of ownership, circularity impact, and customer value. The real challenge wasn’t the math — it was re-incentivizing sales teams to focus on uptime and reuse instead of volume.
- Electronics supplier: piloting take-back with secondary-market economics. They mapped the full return process, scanned resale prices to select viable SKUs, and built a business case before testing with collectors and wholesalers. The milestones were clear: short-term visibility in secondary markets and subsidy fit; mid-term reductions verified through LCAs; long-term cost savings, resilience, and market share in refurbished products.
- Industrial manufacturer: starting at the design stage. By the time a product reaches the market, most of its footprint is already locked in. That led to closer work with R&D to embed reuse and recyclability from the beginning. Engineers and product teams often saw it as a burden, focused as they were on cost or performance. What helped was reframing circularity as a business opportunity: lowering reliance on virgin materials, reducing regulatory risk, and opening new models for reuse or refurbishment. Once design teams began asking different questions, procurement and suppliers had to adapt too, creating a ripple effect across the value chain.
Where companies stumble (so you can avoid it)
- Short-term ROI myopia that ignores TCO, end-of-life costs, and strategic risk
- Fragmented ownership that kills momentum
- Single-company take-back approaches that ignore ecosystem dynamics
How to brief your CFO
- ROI over the life cycle: map where money is made and saved. Include servitization, repair and refurb revenue, reduced warranty and disposal costs, and secondary-material savings. Put it all on one PLC line to show top- and bottom-line impact over time.
- Risk lens: link material-compliance exposure directly to cost avoidance and supply resilience.
A 30–60–90 day playbook
Next 30 days
- Pick one product-market with clear regulatory or customer pull.
- Build an assumption-based business case using secondary-market data.
- Stand up a cross-functional task force and name a single owner.
Days 31–60
- Pilot one R-strategy: repair, refurb, or targeted take-back.
- Define KPIs: take-back rate, share of reused components, % secondary materials, service revenue, warranty cost cuts.
- Start closing end-of-life data gaps with suppliers and recyclers.
Days 61–90
- Rework sales incentives for the pilot offer — pay on uptime, retention, or circular score.
- Create a one-page management narrative with short-, mid-, and long-term goals to keep momentum and funding.
Let us know what you think about circularity. Share your story, ask the questions you’ve always had, or tell us what we should cover next. Just hit reply.
