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 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 rolled out buyback services across participating regions, offering a pathway for eligible furniture to re-enter the market instead of heading to landfills. Its pre-owned selections and spare-parts provisions tackle a common dilemma: household items frequently get thrown away due to a missing piece, a relocation, or a shift in the owner’s lifestyle.
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 merges circular product design with a return mechanism tailored for business clients. Such a distinction is crucial: whereas recycled materials decrease the need for certain virgin resources, retrieving flooring at the end of its lifecycle ensures those components remain accessible for subsequent manufacturing phases.
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, 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 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.
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 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 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 changes the usual smartphone calculation by treating a longer ownership period as a product feature. Its impact depends on how long customers actually keep their phones and whether repair remains practical and affordable.
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 provides used athletic equipment, trade-in or buyback programs, and rental solutions across select regions. Such alternatives fit gear needed for a brief season, a fresh interest, or a growing youngster. Restoring a qualified bicycle for a new buyer, for instance, allows a costly, resource-heavy item to find a second life.
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 initiatives and certified refurbished offerings provide qualifying hardware with avenues for extended lifecycles. For items past the point of reuse, the tech giant has engineered specialized disassembly workflows—featuring the Daisy robot—to reclaim targeted resources. Furthermore, Apple has elevated the proportion of recycled materials utilized across segments of its hardware portfolio.
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.
