It gets limited and misunderstood.
Here’s a pattern I’ve seen many times.
A strong circular concept gets developed by the people whose job it is to care about sustainability.
Then it hits the rest of the organisation like a foreign object — because circularity isn’t about carbon neutrality or reporting.
And it isn’t only recycling either.
The usual fix is:
“We need more buy-in from the other functions.”
True.
But incomplete.
It still treats circularity as something the Sustainability Team owns and has to sell inward.
That’s only half of it.
Circularity has to work across the whole value chain.
The whole organisation needs to act in harmony.
Otherwise:
- Product Development comes up with circular ideas, but Procurement can’t justify the price of the matching materials.
- Engineering designs for repair, but the service organisation isn’t set up to support it.
- Sales struggles to convince customers of the new circular business model.
- Finance evaluates a circular model using a business case built for a linear one.
Every part of the organisation has to move in the same direction.
Or the approach fails.
Circularity should not be part of the Sustainability Team.
It should be the new way of doing business.