Closed Loop Commerce: Lessons from the Field on Scaling Circular Economy Business Models

Abstract

The circular economy is no longer just a vision to discuss at different conference tables, but has quickly come to be considered a business imperative [1]. In the Netherlands, manufacturers are converting post-consumer plastics into high-quality packaging. Japanese electronics companies are trying to recover rare-earth minerals from urban waste streams; they are cheaper to recover from the wastes than to mine. Today, construction businesses in South Korea get 20% of their total inputs from demolished structures. That's revenue lines — not sustainability side-projects. What our vanguard companies have seen, and at high-Ish cost – is that creating scale in a circular economy requires a new commercial logic in which the end of a product's life is also the start of another value creation cycle.