Well, that is … bad.
Real circularity isn’t recycling.
It’s reuse, repair, refurbish.
And every one of them depends on the same thing before anything else works:
The product has to come back.
Enough of them.
Often enough.
In good enough condition.
No return flow, no circular business.
It’s that simple — and that overlooked.
What I see most of the time:
Companies pour their energy into the visible, exciting parts:
- Circular product design
- Technology
- The sustainability story
All still inside a linear setup.
Then the pilot starts.
And the returns don’t come.
- We overestimated how motivated customers would be to send products back.
- We trusted the linear infrastructure to work just as well in reverse.
- We underestimated what it costs to make the reverse flow worth running.
The model stalls — not because the idea was wrong, but because nothing came back to feed it.
Reverse logistics isn’t the glamorous part of circularity.
But it’s what makes it happen — or fail.
And it’s genuinely hard.
It means designing:
- Return incentives
- Collection networks
- Sorting
- Inspection
- Reverse transport
Often for products that were never designed to come back in the first place.
Forward supply chains took decades to optimise.
The reverse one is where most companies are still starting from zero.
So before the design, before the pitch, before the pilot, the quieter questions decide everything:
How do we even find these products?
And how do they actually come back to us?
Is that flow strong enough to build a business on?
Get reverse logistics right, and circularity has a foundation.
Get it wrong, and everything built on top eventually sinks.
Who owns reverse logistics in your organisation?