What 10 brands have adopted 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 introduced significant shifts in their product design processes, client service methods, and used merchandise recovery strategies. None of them achieves full circularity. Nevertheless, their journeys illustrate the potential of this methodology alongside the ongoing effort needed to curb waste and the reliance on virgin materials.
1. Patagonia: Repair and resale alongside new clothing
Patagonia’s Worn Wear program gives customers ways to trade in eligible clothing and buy used items. The company also offers repairs and publishes care guidance intended to extend garment life. These services make a jacket or pack valuable to the business beyond its first sale.
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 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 business-model shift is from selling furniture only once to helping it pass between owners and remain usable. Success depends on durable design, affordable collection and transport, and evidence that secondhand purchases displace new production.
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, 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 offers refurbished medical equipment, including selected imaging systems, as an alternative to buying new. Refurbishment can involve inspection, replacement of components, software updates, and testing before equipment returns to clinical use. Philips also works on service and equipment-life extension.
This represents a notable circular economy prospect since healthcare apparatuses often incorporate considerable amounts of resources and demand extensive work to produce. It also poses a tough challenge: any restored unit has to fulfill all relevant safety and functionality standards. Circularity must never compromise clinical dependability.
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 runs a pre-owned initiative for qualified used apparel, alongside offering repair and tailoring solutions via designated outlets. Resale grants pre-existing denim a second life with a new buyer, while adjustments enable owners to continue wearing pieces that require mending or no longer fit properly.
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 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 represent distinct stages rather than interchangeable assertions. Retaining a functional device in operation safeguards a greater portion of its production value compared to dismantling it for raw components. Although recycling stays vital whenever repurposing ceases to be feasible, it cannot single-handedly counterbalance the impacts of rapid upgrades.
What makes these changes meaningful?
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:
- How long products remain in active use, and how often they are repaired or passed to another owner.
- How much new production a reused or refurbished product actually replaces.
- Whether demand for virgin materials falls across the business, not just within one product line.
- The impacts of collection, transport, processing, and any additional purchases encouraged by the program.
These brands show that circularity can change what a company sells and what it considers valuable. The deeper transformation is not simply offering a take-back scheme; it is building a business that benefits when products last, move efficiently between users, and require fewer new resources over time.
