What business models are emerging in the circular economy?
In our circular economy deck, you will find everything you need to understand the market
SUMMARY
The business models emerging most clearly in the circular economy are resale marketplaces, B2B pooling, reverse-logistics software, enterprise reuse, product-data infrastructure, repair networks and integrated second-life models that recover value before materials reach low-value recycling.
The strongest models usually preserve the product rather than destroy it. Reselling a phone, recirculating a pallet or redeploying an office asset keeps far more of the original economic value intact than recovering its raw materials at the end.
Who physically handles the product is one of the biggest dividing lines between good and difficult economics. Peer-to-peer marketplaces can scale with relatively little inventory infrastructure because users store, photograph and pack the goods themselves, while managed resale absorbs those costs directly.
Repeated utilization can be even more attractive than resale. CHEP and IFCO show that owning physical assets can produce excellent economics when those assets are standardized, frequently reused and kept inside controlled logistics networks.
Some of the most interesting circular businesses barely look like recycling companies at all. Trove, Optoro and Rheaply are selling software that decides where an existing product should go next, turning reverse logistics and asset visibility into infrastructure.
Regulation is changing who pays. Digital Product Passports, extended producer responsibility and repair incentives increasingly give manufacturers a legal reason to spend money on traceability, collection, repair, reuse and end-of-life systems.
Repair becomes much easier to commercialize when somebody else helps close the gap between repair cost and replacement cost. France's producer-funded repair bonuses are an unusually direct example of regulation creating revenue for repair networks.
Industrial circular marketplaces have a harder job than consumer resale platforms. Material specifications, contamination, transport and compliance can kill otherwise sensible trades, which is why companies such as Cyrkl are adding software, consulting and managed services rather than relying only on marketplace fees.
Capital intensity remains the clearest danger zone. Renewcell and Li-Cycle show how a technically serious recycling operation can still fail when expensive plants need throughput and buyers before the commercial market is ready.
Battery circularity may offer a better structure because one asset can generate value several times: through collection, second-life energy storage, recycling and recovered-material sales. The closer a company gets to choosing the highest-value next use rather than automatically recycling, the more interesting the economics become.
The broader pattern is fairly clear: circular businesses look strongest when they recover value early, minimize unnecessary handling, keep assets moving and get paid for coordination as well as physical processing. Recycling remains essential, but many of the better business models make their money before recycling is necessary.
This market map, featured in our circular economy deck, highlights top companies and startups in the circular economy
Why are circular economy business models getting more interesting now?
Circular economy business models are getting more interesting today because companies are finding ways to recover economic value before products become low-value waste, while regulation is creating customers that barely existed a few years ago.
The latest Circularity Gap Report puts the scale of the opportunity in unusually financial terms. Circle Economy estimates that the global economy loses about €25.4 trillion of avoidable value each year through inefficient material use, premature deterioration, food losses, energy losses and products reaching the end of their lives too early. That is roughly 31% of global GDP in the report's calculation. Its previous global measurement also found that only 6.9% of materials entering the economy came from secondary sources.
Europe gives us another useful measure. The European Investment Bank and European Commission estimate that roughly €120 billion is already invested in circular-economy activities each year in the EU, yet another €82 billion a year would be needed between 2025 and 2040 to meet existing ambitions. The biggest gaps are in areas such as construction, textiles, batteries, vehicles and end-of-life infrastructure.
Capital has already started moving. The Circularity Gap Report Finance tracked almost $164 billion invested in circular businesses between 2018 and 2023. Interestingly, a large share went into familiar activities such as repair, second-hand vehicles, electrical-goods resale and recycling. Investors have generally been more comfortable funding businesses where somebody already knows who pays and why.
That gives us a useful definition of “emerging.” Rental, repair, resale and reusable packaging have existed for decades. What is changing is the ability to scale them because software has lowered transaction costs, logistics have improved, regulation has changed who pays, or companies have found a better way to keep the value embedded in an existing product.
Which circular economy business model has already proved it can scale?
Resale marketplaces have already proved that a circular economy business can reach billions in transaction volume, grow quickly and, in several cases, make money.
Vinted is the clearest example in fashion. In its 2025 results, the company reported €10.8 billion of gross merchandise value, 47% more than a year earlier. Revenue reached €1.1 billion, net profit was €62 million and free cash flow reached €137 million. The company now operates across 26 markets and was valued at €8 billion in a secondary transaction announced afterwards.
Refurbished electronics are following the same path. Back Market finished 2025 with more than $3.5 billion of GMV, up 32%, and said it had reached break-even profitability. Its recent numbers also suggest that refurbished electronics are spreading beyond smartphones. Around 40% of US GMV now comes from other categories such as laptops, tablets, gaming consoles and audio equipment.
ThredUp gives us a third version of the model. In its latest quarterly results, the US fashion-resale company reported record revenue of $90.8 million, up 17%, with 1.77 million active buyers, up 21%. Orders grew 22%. ThredUp still lost $5.9 million on a GAAP basis during the quarter, but adjusted EBITDA reached $4.8 million.
Consumers are therefore buying used fashion, professionally refurbished electronics and second-hand clothing at serious scale. Price helps enormously: second-hand goods let consumers buy brands or devices that would cost considerably more new.
| Business | Circular model | Latest scale | What we learn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vinted | Peer-to-peer second-hand marketplace | €10.8B GMV, €1.1B revenue | A resale marketplace can combine very large transaction volume with profit and free cash flow. |
| Back Market | Refurbished-electronics marketplace | $3.5B+ GMV | Refurbished technology can work at multi-billion-dollar scale across several device categories. |
| ThredUp | Managed fashion resale | $90.8M latest quarterly revenue, 1.77M active buyers | Demand is real, although physically processing second-hand inventory makes the model harder to run profitably. |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest circular economy report.
As this chart shows, and as featured in our circular economy deck, search interest in eco-friendly brands has been growing steadily
Why are peer-to-peer resale marketplaces so attractive?
Peer-to-peer resale marketplaces have a big structural advantage because users do much of the expensive physical work themselves.
The key question is who touches the item. On Vinted, the seller stores the garment, photographs it, writes the listing and packs it after a sale. The marketplace provides discovery, payments, trust mechanisms and increasingly shipping infrastructure. Millions of households effectively become tiny decentralized warehouses.
A managed-resale company such as ThredUp offers consumers more convenience but has to do much more itself. Clothes arrive at its facilities, where items have to be opened, sorted, inspected, photographed, catalogued, stored and eventually fulfilled. Those operations create a much heavier cost base even when accounting gross margins look good.
ThredUp's latest results show the tension well. Its gross margin reached 79.9%, yet the company still recorded a $5.9 million quarterly net loss. Then, in June 2026, ThredUp launched Direct Listing, allowing users to sell directly to one another with AI-assisted listing tools and 0% seller fees. The company is keeping its managed-consignment business, but the move is revealing: even one of the biggest operators of centralized resale wants part of its marketplace to work with less physical handling.
A second-hand item may only sell for $20, $40 or $80. Every extra human touch consumes a meaningful percentage of that value. Photography, storage and shipping do not get dramatically cheaper just because the item being processed is inexpensive.
Are brands turning resale and product returns into software businesses?
Yes. Branded resale and returns are increasingly becoming a software and infrastructure business sold to retailers that want to recover more value from products they have already made.
Trove shows how the model is evolving. Instead of building another consumer marketplace, Trove gives brands the software and operations needed to run trade-in, resale and returns programs through their own websites and stores. It says its platform has processed more than seven million resale items, while its point-of-sale software is live in more than 700 stores.
The business moved further upstream in 2025. Trove acquired European recommerce provider Reverse.Supply, opened a European headquarters and deployed its operations software across 19 facilities globally. Its newer returns-management product uses software to decide whether an item should go back into normal inventory, enter resale, be marked down or take another route.
Trove currently advertises reductions of up to 40% in returns-processing labor and margin improvements of 60% to 80% on aged or imperfect inventory. Those are vendor-reported results rather than industry averages, so we would not treat them as universal. They still show exactly what the customer is paying for: better recovery on inventory that has already been manufactured.
Optoro developed around a similar problem. It built software for returns initiation, warehouse processing and deciding where returned merchandise should go next. In 2025, supply-chain software giant Blue Yonder acquired Optoro and integrated it into its broader returns platform. Blue Yonder cited US retail returns approaching $890 billion annually and said as much as 18% of inventory can be tied up in the returns process.
The acquisition is pretty good evidence that reverse logistics is moving into mainstream supply-chain software rather than remaining a specialist sustainability function.
| Model | What the customer pays for | Why it is attractive |
|---|---|---|
| Trove | Resale, trade-in, returns routing and recommerce infrastructure | Brands can sell used and imperfect inventory while keeping control of pricing and the customer relationship. |
| Optoro / Blue Yonder | Returns processing and disposition software | Better routing can recover more value from merchandise and reduce reverse-logistics costs. |
| Brand-owned resale programs | A new channel for products already manufactured | The brand can earn from a second transaction instead of leaving the entire secondary market to third-party platforms. |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest circular economy report.
This chart, featured in our circular economy deck, shows annual venture capital investment in circular economy startups
Can surplus marketplaces make money before products become waste?
Yes. Surplus marketplaces can build a strong circular business by selling products during the short window when their commercial value is collapsing but their usefulness is still intact.
Too Good To Go has taken that logic further than almost anyone in food. The company currently reports more than 120 million registered users, around 180,000 active business partners across 21 countries and more than 500 million meals saved through its different services.
The transaction is easy to understand. A bakery might have ten bags of food left near closing time. Tomorrow, those products may be worth nothing. Too Good To Go finds buyers today, generally at around one-third of the original price. The bakery earns something from inventory it was about to lose, while the customer gets cheap food.
The company's recent US growth suggests that the model still has room to expand. During the first seven months of 2025, Americans bought 8.1 million meals through the platform, 67% more than during the same period a year earlier. Too Good To Go added 5,000 US partners in roughly a year and reached more than 17,000 there.
The same model can work with hotel inventory, industrial components, excess construction materials, spare parts and other goods where value falls rapidly once a particular moment passes. It becomes harder when the product is cheap, bulky or located far away, because transport can quickly cost more than the recovered value.
Can companies make money by helping businesses reuse what they already own?
Yes. Enterprise reuse software is turning unused furniture, equipment and materials into searchable inventory before companies spend money buying the same things again.
Rheaply is building directly around this problem. Its platform lets organizations catalogue assets, move them between departments, sell them externally, donate them or include them in building decommissioning projects.
The company's 2025 platform data gives us an idea of the scale. Rheaply reported $28.7 million of value exchanged during the year, 159,600 items finding new users and 12.7 million items available for reuse. Its customers range across corporations, universities, healthcare systems, governments and real-estate portfolios.
The commercial pitch is surprisingly ordinary. A company may have hundreds of desks sitting in storage while another office orders new ones. A university laboratory may dispose of equipment that another department is preparing to buy. Large organizations are often very good at procurement and surprisingly bad at knowing what they already own.
Rheaply has expanded beyond internal office inventory as well. Materials Marketplace has joined the platform, adding difficult waste streams and industrial by-products. That pushes the model closer to procurement infrastructure: companies can search for used equipment or reclaimed materials before buying virgin alternatives.
This area is still much smaller than consumer resale, so the confidence level should be lower. But it works whenever the assets are valuable enough for avoided purchases, storage and disposal costs to justify the software.
This chart, featured in our circular economy deck, shows why Back Market is winning in the circular economy
Does product-as-a-service work better in B2B than consumer rental?
Product-as-a-service currently looks much stronger in B2B settings where assets are standardized, valuable, heavily used and easy to bring back into a controlled network.
CHEP is probably the best large-scale example. Brambles owns the blue pallets and containers used across its network, rents access to them and repeatedly collects, repairs and recirculates them. In its latest FY2026 results, Brambles reported $7.04 billion of revenue, $1.49 billion of underlying profit and more than $1 billion of free cash flow before dividends. Return on capital invested reached 22.6%.
Brambles had roughly 352 million pallets, crates and containers across about 60 countries at the end of its latest financial year. High utilization turns that ownership into an advantage rather than a burden.
IFCO applies similar economics to reusable fresh-food containers. It currently manages more than 400 million reusable containers that make over 2.5 billion shipments each year through a network of more than 115 service centers. Growers and retailers send standardized crates around a relatively controlled supply chain, which makes collection and reuse predictable.
Hilti uses the idea with professional tools. Its Fleet Management customers pay a fixed recurring fee covering tools, service and repairs. Hilti reports more than one million tools and around 100,000 customers under its current fleet offering, while its sustainability reporting says the company collects more than one million tools, batteries and accessories each year across its broader circular operations.
Consumer rental is much tougher. Rent the Runway generated $329.8 million of revenue in fiscal 2025, but rental-product depreciation and revenue sharing cost $133.8 million and fulfillment another $88.5 million. Together, those two physical costs consumed roughly two-thirds of revenue. The company still posted a $57.5 million operating loss despite higher revenue.
A pallet can make trip after trip through standardized warehouses. A designer dress has to be inspected, cleaned, stored, picked, packed and shipped to individual consumers. That difference explains most of the gap.
| Model | Physical loop | Latest commercial evidence | Our read |
|---|---|---|---|
| CHEP | Highly standardized B2B pallet network | $7.04B FY2026 revenue, 22.6% ROIC | One of the strongest circular ownership models we can find. |
| IFCO | Reusable food crates moving through controlled supply chains | 400M+ containers, 2.5B+ annual shipments | Scale comes from standardization and repeated utilization. |
| Hilti Fleet Management | Professional tools with maintenance and return built into the contract | 1M+ tools, around 100,000 customers | High-value durable assets fit recurring service revenue well. |
| Rent the Runway | Individually handled consumer fashion | $329.8M revenue but $57.5M operating loss in FY2025 | Reuse is real, but logistics and product depreciation remain expensive. |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest circular economy report.
Is repair finally becoming a scalable circular economy business?
Repair is becoming more commercially attractive now, although a traditional repair shop still has much harder economics than a software marketplace.
The basic problem has always been labor. Manufacturing produces thousands or millions of identical units through optimized supply chains. Repair brings one broken product to one technician, who has to diagnose one specific problem and source the right part. For cheap products, the labor can easily cost more than replacement.
What has changed lately is that governments are actively shifting the economics.
EU right-to-repair rules now apply across member states. Consumers can request repairs for products covered by EU reparability requirements, manufacturers must provide information and spare parts under defined conditions, and choosing repair rather than replacement during the legal guarantee period can extend that guarantee by at least another year. The European Commission estimates the measures could generate €4.8 billion of additional growth and investment.
France goes further by paying part of the repair bill through producer-funded schemes. The country's repair bonus covers categories including electronics, appliances, textiles, shoes, furniture, sports equipment, tools and toys. A qualifying consumer gets an immediate discount, while the accredited repairer receives the missing amount from the relevant producer-responsibility organization. For example, replacing a long zipper on an eligible garment can currently receive a €14 subsidy.
Digital platforms can make the sector easier to scale as well. The EU is building a European repair platform intended to help consumers find repair providers, while companies such as Back Market have been moving beyond refurbished-device sales into repair services in individual markets.
The better opportunities are therefore likely to sit around repair networks, spare-parts logistics, diagnostics, warranties, refurbishment and software connecting producers with repairers.
This chart, featured in our circular economy deck, shows annual funding in circular economy startups
Are Digital Product Passports and producer responsibility creating new circular economy customers?
Yes. Digital Product Passports and extended producer responsibility are creating new circular economy customers because manufacturers are increasingly being required to pay for product information, repair, collection, reuse and end-of-life treatment.
The Digital Product Passport has already moved from policy language to infrastructure. The European Commission has switched on the Digital Product Passport Registry and released the first harmonized technical standards covering identifiers, interoperability, data carriers, APIs, data exchange and storage.
Batteries are the first major test. From February 2027, electric-vehicle batteries, light-mobility batteries and industrial batteries above 2 kWh placed on the EU market will need a battery passport. In its latest implementation guidance, the Commission mapped 71 separate battery-passport data points and explained which ones will be mandatory, optional or conditional.
Manufacturers therefore have to gather information from several layers of their supply chains, attach it to individual products, maintain it, control who can access sensitive fields and integrate all of this with existing manufacturing and enterprise systems.
That complexity is already creating suppliers. Circulor currently reports 1.4 million vehicles with its traceability technology, 1.2 billion traceability events and 624,000 Digital Product Passports issued. Volvo has used Circulor for the battery passport attached to its production vehicles. Circularise is working with companies including Honda, Teijin and Samsonite on traceability and passport systems.
Producer-responsibility rules create another layer of demand. Under the revised EU Waste Framework Directive, every member state has to establish extended producer responsibility schemes for textiles and footwear. Producers will pay fees based on the products they put on the market, and those funds will help finance collection, preparation for reuse, recycling and disposal.
The European Commission estimates that the EU generated around 12.6 million tonnes of textile waste in 2019 and only about one-fifth was separately collected for reuse or recycling. Packaging is moving in the same direction through stronger producer-responsibility, reuse and refill requirements.
France's repair bonuses show what these funding flows can look like in practice. The manufacturer or importer contributes to an eco-organization, the eco-organization helps fund repair, and the consumer receives a cheaper repair price.
The commercial shift is straightforward: circular businesses increasingly have a manufacturer with a legal budget on the other side of the transaction. That should support markets for product-data software, compliance systems, repair networks, collection, sorting, resale and recycling.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest circular economy report.
Can marketplaces for industrial waste and by-products become big businesses?
Industrial waste marketplaces are becoming credible B2B businesses, although this market is still earlier and messier than consumer resale.
Cyrkl is a useful example. The European platform connects companies that generate waste or production leftovers with recyclers and manufacturers that can use those materials. Its live marketplace currently shows almost 15,000 companies, while recent European program material cites more than 21,000 registered entities across the broader platform.
The business has also expanded beyond simply matching buyers and sellers. Cyrkl now sells waste-management services, consulting and its Copilot software for tracking waste flows, costs, revenues, compliance and emissions. The company says its managed waste programs typically target cost savings of 10% to 30%, and it has worked with more than 200 companies including Škoda Auto, IKEA and Skanska.
That hybrid model probably tells us where industrial circular marketplaces are heading. Pure transaction fees can be difficult because waste streams are irregular, specifications matter and logistics are expensive. Software, compliance, consulting and managed procurement create more recurring ways to charge.
The same logic is appearing elsewhere. Orbio operates a European marketplace for industrial waste and secondary raw materials. Rheaply has expanded its reuse network into materials and by-products. A recent academic study of circular platforms identified waste-trading marketplaces as a distinct platform category, with companies increasingly adding reporting, traceability and operational services around the transaction.
One company's disposal cost can become another company's input cost, but chemical composition, contamination, regulation, transportation and minimum volumes can all kill a trade. The companies that can handle those details should have a much better chance than platforms that simply post listings.
This chart, featured in our circular economy deck, compares the main business model options for refurbished tech sellers
Can recycling work better when companies add second-life economics?
Yes. Recycling becomes a much stronger circular business when companies can extract value before the material reaches the recycling plant and secure customers for what comes out afterwards.
Recent failures show why pure recycling can be difficult. Renewcell built an industrial process turning cotton-rich textile waste into Circulose pulp for new fibers. Its first large plant was designed to reach 60,000 tonnes of annual capacity, with roughly SEK 1.33 billion of capital expenditure committed to that first stage.
Demand did not arrive fast enough. Renewcell sold only about 18,000 tonnes in 2023, far below the level required to keep the plant economically full. The company struggled to secure additional financing and entered bankruptcy in 2024. Its assets were later acquired and the technology continues under the Circulose name.
Li-Cycle ran into a similar problem in battery recycling. The company built a network of processing facilities and planned a major hub in Rochester, New York. Costs rose, the project was paused and the company eventually entered creditor protection. Glencore acquired the core Li-Cycle assets in 2025, including facilities in Germany, Arizona, Alabama, New York and Ontario as well as the Rochester project and intellectual property.
Redwood Materials is pursuing a broader model. The company says it receives more than 20 GWh of lithium-ion batteries each year, roughly equivalent to the batteries in 250,000 EVs, and produces more than 60,000 tonnes of critical materials. Its processes recover more than 95% of materials such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper.
Redwood has also built an energy-storage business using both new and repurposed batteries. Batteries that have lost enough performance to leave a vehicle may still have years of useful life in stationary storage.
The latest General Motors project makes that model tangible. Redwood plans to install around 100 repurposed GM battery packs at a GM manufacturing site, creating a 1.5 MW / 7.2 MWh energy-storage system. GM expects the installation to save more than $3 million in electricity costs over its lifetime. Redwood says it has already received more than 28,000 tonnes of GM and Ultium material and has roughly 10,000 EV battery packs in its pipeline that could potentially be repurposed.
After second life, the material can still be recycled. Toyota has agreed to source cathode material and anode copper foil from Redwood, with targeted recycled content including 100% recycled copper in the anode foil and meaningful shares of recycled nickel, lithium and cobalt in cathode material.
That gives one battery several possible revenue stages: collection, second-life storage, recycling and recovered-material sales. Compared with a plant that depends almost entirely on throughput and commodity economics, the model has more ways to preserve value.
Which circular economy business models look strongest today?
The strongest circular economy business models today are resale marketplaces, B2B pooling, recommerce and reverse-logistics software, enterprise reuse platforms and increasingly product-data infrastructure; capital-heavy recycling remains important but carries much more execution risk.
Peer-to-peer and specialist resale marketplaces sit near the top. They preserve most of the value of the product while avoiding much of the inventory burden of traditional retail. Fashion and refurbished electronics have now produced multi-billion-dollar transaction platforms.
B2B pooling is even more mature economically. Standardized pallets, crates and professional equipment can circulate repeatedly through networks where the provider controls collection and maintenance. Brambles' latest 22.6% return on capital invested shows that a circular company can own a huge physical asset base and still generate strong returns when utilization is high.
Recommerce software and reverse logistics look particularly attractive because they earn money from circular activity without needing to finance every asset themselves. Trove helps brands resell products, Blue Yonder has brought Optoro's returns technology into mainstream supply-chain software, and Rheaply applies similar coordination economics to enterprise assets.
Digital Product Passports are earlier, but the direction is now hard to ignore. The EU registry is operational, battery requirements are approaching and manufacturers have dozens of data fields to organize across fragmented supply chains.
Repair is also becoming more commercially workable as producer-funded bonuses and right-to-repair rules lower the effective cost to consumers. Industrial waste marketplaces remain less proven, but companies such as Cyrkl are showing how transaction marketplaces can expand into software, compliance and managed services.
Standalone capital-intensive recycling without secured feedstock or buyers still looks much riskier. Renewcell and Li-Cycle both had serious technology and large physical assets, but neither had enough economic protection when the ramp became difficult.
| Circular business model | Where it stands today | Main reason it works or struggles |
|---|---|---|
| Peer-to-peer resale marketplaces | Proven at large scale | Users carry much of the inventory and handling burden while the platform monetizes transactions. |
| Refurbished-product marketplaces | Proven and still growing | High-value goods can support testing, refurbishment and warranties while remaining cheaper than new. |
| B2B pooling / product-as-a-service | Very strong in the right assets | Standardization, high utilization and controlled returns allow the same asset to generate revenue repeatedly. |
| Recommerce and reverse-logistics software | Strong and expanding | Software captures part of recovered product value without owning most of the physical inventory. |
| Enterprise reuse platforms | Promising and increasingly practical | Customers can fund the service through avoided procurement, storage and disposal costs. |
| Digital Product Passport infrastructure | Early but accelerating now | Regulation is creating mandatory demand for product-level data and traceability. |
| Repair networks and infrastructure | Improving | New repair rules and producer-funded incentives are making the economics more workable. |
| Industrial waste marketplaces | Promising but still fragmented | Large potential savings exist, although material specifications, regulation and logistics make transactions difficult. |
| Integrated battery circularity | High potential | Batteries can generate value through second life, recycling and recovered-material sales. |
| Standalone advanced recycling plants | Necessary but risky | High capex and dependence on throughput, feedstock, commodity prices and buyers leave little room for mistakes. |
So what business models are emerging in the circular economy? We see a fairly clear answer now.
The biggest businesses are forming around second transactions, repeated use, reverse logistics, asset visibility, product data and the ability to choose the next-best use for something that already exists.
Recycling will remain a huge part of the circular economy, but many of the more attractive models make money earlier in the product's life, while there is still more value left to recover.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest circular economy report.
This chart, featured in our circular economy deck, shows the revenue mix across customer segments in the circular economy
OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis looks at which circular economy business models are becoming commercially compelling today. We broke the market into distinct models including resale, recommerce and reverse logistics, surplus marketplaces, enterprise reuse, B2B pooling, repair, Digital Product Passports, industrial material marketplaces and recycling with second-life economics.
We focused mainly on recent operating evidence: company revenue, transaction volume, profitability, free cash flow, utilization, active users, acquisitions, changes in business model, infrastructure deployment, regulatory developments and, where useful, business failures. The aim was to understand how each model actually makes money rather than judge circularity in the abstract.
We assessed individual companies alongside broader patterns. One successful company does not prove that every version of a model works, and one bankruptcy does not invalidate an entire category. We gave more weight to mechanisms that appeared repeatedly across different companies and markets.
The main economic distinctions were how much physical handling a model requires, whether assets can generate revenue repeatedly, whether customers can justify spending through avoided procurement or disposal costs, whether regulation creates a funded buyer, and how much value remains in the product when the circular transaction happens.
Company-reported operating metrics are used as evidence of scale and commercial activity, but broader conclusions rely more heavily on financial disclosures, regulatory material and institutional research where those were available. Vendor-reported savings or performance claims are treated as examples of the commercial proposition rather than universal industry benchmarks.
The final assessment is a synthesis rather than a mechanical ranking. Models rank more strongly when several pieces of evidence point in the same direction: recurring demand, scalable operations, workable unit economics and a clear way to preserve or recover economic value.
Key institutional and regulatory sources include Circle Economy's Circularity Gap work, the European Investment Bank's circular-economy research, the European Commission's Right to Repair material, Directive (EU) 2024/1799, the EU's Ecodesign and Digital Product Passport framework, the EU Batteries Regulation, and the European Commission's textiles policy material.
Company-level sources include Vinted, Back Market, ThredUp, Trove, Blue Yonder, Optoro, Too Good To Go, Rheaply, Brambles / CHEP, IFCO, Hilti, Rent the Runway, Cyrkl, Redwood Materials, and Circulor.
This chart, featured in our circular economy deck, shows how recommerce marketplace technology has evolved over time
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