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 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 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 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 expanded beyond new-vehicle manufacturing through activities that include vehicle refurbishment, parts recovery, and work on used electric-vehicle batteries. Its industrial refurbishment operations aim to return products and components to use where feasible, while its wider recovery efforts seek value from vehicles at the end of their lives.
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 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 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 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.
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 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.
