The World Economic Forum and Bain & Company have published a new circularity playbook for industrial manufacturers as volatile input costs, supply disruption, and concentrated raw material production push resource security further into board level decision making.
The Resilience-to-Growth Circularity Playbook for Industrial Solutions and Manufacturing argues that circular business models are moving beyond environmental programmes and becoming part of decisions around competitiveness, resilience, service revenue, and long term access to materials.
The World Economic Forum’s publication says 80% of executives now regard circularity as important or very important to their organisation, with that figure expected to rise to 94% within three years. The report also identifies limited visibility and operational complexity as continuing barriers between ambition and execution.
The survey also found that 77% of Industrial Solutions & Manufacturing executives believe circularity could substantially address resource security if adopted at scale, while only 26% of companies have comprehensive visibility into their critical material dependencies.
That gap matters because manufacturers cannot manage a material risk they have not mapped across products, suppliers, maintenance requirements, and end of life flows. A bill of materials may identify what enters a product, but exposure can extend through replacement parts, coatings, electronics, tooling, outsourced assemblies, and sub-tier suppliers.
The playbook sets out a three stage approach: quantify risk exposure and the value at stake, codify the circular interventions with the strongest lifecycle case, and amplify them through governance, data, technology, partnerships, and finance.
The sequence puts measurement before broad commitments. Industrial businesses can pursue repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing, modernisation, service models, component recovery, and material recycling, but the financial case varies sharply between products. A high value machine with a long service life can contain recoverable structures and components worth preserving; a low value product with complex mixed materials may be far harder to recover economically.
Repair extends equipment life without replacing the whole asset. Refurbishment can restore used products to an acceptable operating condition, while remanufacturing goes further by rebuilding equipment or components against defined specifications. Modernisation can retain expensive mechanical structures while replacing controls, sensors, drives, electronics, or software.
Those models are already familiar across machine tools, engines, industrial drives, rail equipment, aerospace components, heavy vehicles, and electrical systems. The difficulty is turning individual programmes into repeatable operations across product families rather than treating every returned asset as a special engineering project.
That requires design decisions much earlier in the lifecycle. Equipment assembled so that motors, bearings, controls, power electronics, and wear components can be separated and replaced is easier to refurbish than a product optimised principally for minimum first build cost. Material selection and joining methods can also determine whether valuable metals and components can be recovered economically at end of life.
Data is equally important. Manufacturers need to know which configuration an asset left the factory in, what has been replaced during service, where it is located, how intensively it has been used, and what condition major components are in before committing to a service or remanufacturing proposition.
Digital product records, serialised components, condition monitoring, and service histories can make that assessment more reliable. They also introduce questions around interoperability, ownership of operating data, and whether customers and service partners are willing to share enough information for the original manufacturer to manage the asset through several lives.
The commercial expectations in the survey are substantial. At full circular potential, 70% of respondents expect circular activities to represent at least 20% of revenues, while 81% say they are likely or extremely likely to pursue circularity because of rising costs or reduced availability of virgin materials.
Those figures describe expectations rather than current revenue. Repair, service, leasing, refurbishment, component recovery, and remanufacturing carry different margin structures, working capital requirements, and customer relationships from selling new equipment. They can also compete internally with new product sales unless commercial incentives are designed around total lifecycle value.
Resource security gives companies another reason to tolerate that complexity. Recovering a motor, gearbox, electronic module, high value alloy, or specialist component from the installed base can reduce exposure to new material lead times, especially where supply is concentrated in a small number of producers or countries.
The playbook’s emphasis on quantification is therefore the less visible but more consequential part of the programme. Without a clear view of critical material exposure and the residual value already sitting in products in service, circularity remains a collection of sustainability initiatives rather than an industrial operating strategy.
Manufacturers appear increasingly willing to make that shift. The harder work lies in product architecture, reverse logistics, data systems, service capacity, partner incentives, and recovery infrastructure capable of turning a long lived installed base into a reliable source of parts, materials, revenue, and resilience.
