Circular Transformation of Industries 2025

The concept of circularity has been around for a long time, but has not yet scaled. Businesses and industries have focused mostly on replacing virgin with recycled materials without establishing holistic circular strategies. They have viewed circularity through the prism of sustainability and regulatory compliance, rather than as a means of creating broad value through increased resilience and revenues, and a greater control over costs. Our research, however, shows that not only are new models being adopted but that businesses are also increasingly achieving economic value from circularity. The objective of this paper is to inspire businesses to embrace the potential of circular solutions by highlighting the opportunities for value creation including and beyond sustainability, specifically resilience, revenues and costs. It illustrates how and where businesses can create value with circular solutions, examines some of the barriers that stand in the way of circular transformations and highlights enabling strategies to accelerate the creation of circular ecosystems. The findings in this paper stem from structured consultations with circularity thought leaders across a broad set of manufacturing industries and a global market survey. The survey draws from the responses of 420 participating global top executives engaged in circularity, of whom approximately 70% had more than five years of experience in their role, and were working in medium-sized to large businesses (with revenues greater than $500 million). It consulted executives from four regions (Asia, Europe, North America and South America) in 10 manufacturing industries.4 This paper has been developed by the World Economic Forum, Bain & Company and the University of Cambridge. We thank the members of the Circular Transformation of Industries community for their insights and valuable inputs to this paper. Circular Transformation of Industries: Unlocking Economic Value 4