Which 10 brands have embraced 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 made notable changes to how they design products, serve customers, or recover used goods. None is fully circular. Their examples show both the promise of the approach and the work still required to reduce waste and demand for new resources.
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 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 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 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 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 provides commercial fleets with comprehensive tire-management services, where ongoing performance and maintenance take center stage alongside the initial purchase. Through its specialized retreading operations, the company grants qualified truck-tire casings a renewed lifecycle by simply renewing worn treads instead of scrapping the entire unit.
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 broadened its scope beyond traditional car production by engaging in vehicle reconditioning, component salvage, and the handling of worn-out electric-vehicle batteries. Its industrial overhaul initiatives focus on putting items and parts back into circulation whenever practical, whereas its broader reclamation efforts strive to extract value from end-of-life automobiles.
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 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 is a significant circular opportunity because medical devices can contain substantial quantities of materials and take considerable effort to manufacture. It is also a demanding one: a refurbished system must meet applicable safety and performance requirements. Circularity cannot come at the expense of clinical reliability.
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 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 can also let several customers use one product over time. Whether it reduces impact depends on utilization: equipment needs to be used enough to justify the transport, maintenance, and replacement involved.
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 are distinct steps, not interchangeable claims. Keeping a functional device in use preserves more of its manufactured value than breaking it down for materials. Recycling remains important when reuse is no longer practical, but it cannot by itself offset the effects of frequent replacement.
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 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.
