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 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 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 offers commercial fleets tire-management services in which performance and maintenance matter alongside the initial tire sale. Its retreading business gives suitable truck-tire casings another useful life by replacing worn tread rather than discarding the whole tire.
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 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 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 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 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.
