Re-Consulting Group | Series: Foundations of Circular Economy
What it is, what it's for, how to implement it, and how to overcome the main obstacles.
When a company decides to "become more sustainable," the conversation usually starts and ends in the same place: waste separation and recycling. It's an honest starting point, but it's also why so many sustainability initiatives end up as an additional cost line in the income statement rather than a source of value.
Sustainability is the objective. Circular economy is the guiding axis that makes it achievable within an organization with a budget, quarterly targets, and shareholders. And the Rs are the operational how.
At Re-Consulting Group, our work philosophy is grounded in our framework which considers circular economy as the guiding axis of sustainability. To achieve this objective, we implement concrete activities that span from efficient resource use and fuel optimization and process time reduction, to supply chain closure and interconnection and transportation time reduction. We also promote shared economy models and product lifespan extension. We execute all of this through our framework of reference: the 19 Rs, which constitute the practical methodology for transforming these principles into measurable and sustainable actions.
It's worth pausing on the activities to be performed. Each of these actions—fuel performance, process times, transportation times, lifespan—is simultaneously an environmental lever and an operational efficiency lever. This overlap is not a fortunate coincidence. It is the central mechanism of circular economy.
The dominant economic model since the Industrial Revolution is linear: extract → produce → use → dispose. It operates under two assumptions that no longer hold today: that resources are abundant and cheap, and that the final destination of a product is irrelevant to whoever made it and whoever consumes it.
Circular Economy (CE) proposes a different system: an economic model that keeps materials, components, and products at their highest level of utility and value for the longest time possible, minimizing virgin resource input and waste generation, and decoupling economic growth from resource consumption.
Operatively, this translates into three movements:
Narrow the cycle – use less material and energy per unit of value delivered.
Slow the cycle – extend the lifespan of products and components.
Close the cycle – reincorporate materials into the production system instead of discarding them.
To these three, at Re-Consulting Group we add a fourth that the literature usually treats as an assumption but which in practice is determinative: enable the cycle governance, extended responsibility, and the people who execute it.
CE is not a program parallel to operations. It's not an area, a campaign, or an annual report. It's a decision-making criterion that cuts across purchasing, design, production, logistics, sales, and finance. That's why we position it as a guiding axis and not as just another initiative under the sustainability umbrella.
This is where most corporate presentations split into two narratives that don't talk to each other: one environmental for the sustainability report and another financial for the board. Circular economy is, precisely, the point where those two narratives converge.
Circular economy contributes directly to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), positioning SDG 12 (Responsible production and consumption) as its operational core. It also drives SDG 9 (Industry, innovation, and infrastructure) through process redesign, industrial symbiosis, and technological modernization; strengthens SDG 8 (Decent work and economic growth) by decoupling growth from resource consumption and fostering employment in repair, remanufacturing, and reverse logistics; accelerates SDG 13 (Climate action) by reducing emissions associated with extraction, transport, and disposal; and supports SDG 7 (Affordable and clean energy) through energy efficiency and energy recovery from waste streams.
And indirectly contributes to SDGs 6 (water), 11 (sustainable cities), 14 and 15 (ecosystems), by reducing extraction pressure and end-of-life pollution.
For a company with ESG commitments, this matters for one practical reason: CE allows reporting progress on multiple SDGs with the same set of operational actions, rather than sustaining dispersed initiatives that are difficult to audit.
This is the point we usually defend most insistently: circular economy is not a cost line; it's a lever on gross margin, operating expense, working capital, and the company's risk profile.
The pathways of financial impact are concrete and traceable in the financial statements:
Re-Consulting Group's thesis: when a company formulates its environmental strategy as a compliance cost, it competes against its own P&L. When it formulates it as circular economy, environmental and financial objectives stop being a trade-off and become the same project.
If CE is the guiding axis, the Rs are the concrete strategies through which it is executed. Here, however, the company seeking guidance encounters a real problem.
Scientific literature and international organizations have proposed distinct and partially incompatible frameworks. The general public knows the 3Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle). The European Union's waste hierarchy defines five levels. Potting et al. (2017) formalized the framework of 9Rs (R0–R9). Reike et al. (2018) documented 10 value retention options. And Kirchherr et al. (2017) showed the root of the problem by analyzing 114 distinct definitions of circular economy in academic and professional literature.
This lack of consensus has three practical consequences:
At Re-Consulting Group we consolidated existing frameworks, those documented in peer-reviewed scientific literature and those proposed by international organizations, and complemented them with strategies we identified in industrial practice that were not on the radar of any previous framework. The result is the 19 Rs.
The Rs are not a menu of equivalent options. They group into four families, and order matters: the earlier you intervene, the more value is retained and the lower the intervention cost.
A company that starts with recycling is beginning with the third family. Our work often consists, first, of moving the conversation upward.
Identifying applicable Rs is the diagnosis, not the solution. At Re-Consulting Group we bring them to operation through a five-phase methodology of Assessment, Audit, Consulting, Implementation, and Control, supported by technological, human, and artificial intelligence tools. The Control phase is the one most frequently omitted in the market, and it's what determines whether change persists after year one.
After years of research and field work, our conclusion is consistent: circular economy projects rarely fail for technical reasons. They fail for human reasons.
The technology exists. The business cases hold up. Suppliers are available. What's lacking is adherence: the real willingness of the people operating the process to change the way they work, sustain it when no one is watching, and defend it when it involves friction.
The symptoms are recognizable in almost any organization:
This is the gap we detected and which gave rise to much of our research work. Companies measure tons of waste diverted, kilowatt-hours saved, percentage of recycled material. No one measures the factor that determines whether those numbers will be sustained: people's adherence to circular economy.
Organizational culture is treated as an intangible and therefore managed with intuition, generic workshops, and good intentions.
Re-Consulting Group developed and statistically validated an instrument that measures employee adherence to circular economy. It is the result of a doctoral research process with formal scientific validation, not an adapted climate survey.
What it allows:
Converting culture into a measurable variable is what separates a sustainability program from a sustainable circular transformation.
If the first challenge is that no one measures people, the second is that almost no one measures physical flows well.
In most plants we work with, the data does exist. The problem is that it lives in different places: floor meters, energy and water bills, maintenance logs, area spreadsheets, ERP modules, waste supplier reports, and more frequently than admitted, paper records. Each source with its own periodicity, its own unit of measurement, and its own responsible party.
The consequences are direct and costly:
And there is an additional challenge that, in our view, is the most underestimated in the market: almost all circular economy projects are measured during implementation and stop being measured afterward. Savings are declared once, communicated, and assumed permanent. In practice, without continuous measurement, adherence relaxes, procedures erode, and consumption tends to return to the original baseline. The project continues to exist in institutional presentations long after it has ceased to exist in operations.
That's why at Re-Consulting Group we treat data infrastructure as part of the deliverable, not as a prerequisite the client must resolve on their own. We consolidate in a single platform the flows that currently live scattered and enable real-time monitoring of variables that determine both environmental and financial performance:
along with material and waste flows associated with each R implemented.
This changes three things:
Our thesis on control is this: a circular transformation needs two measurement systems running in parallel. The validated instrument measures people's adherence. The monitoring platform measures the physical flows those people govern. The first explains why the numbers move; the second demonstrates that they did. With only one of the two, the company has half the story, and it's usually the half that doesn't convince the board.
Sustainability defines where the company is headed. Circular economy is the guiding axis that makes that destination operable and financially defensible. The 19 Rs are the concrete repertoire of how to get there. And the human factor is the variable that determines whether the effort sustains or dissolves.
At Re-Consulting Group we work at all four levels: the conceptual framework that orders the decision, the diagnosis that sustains it, the implementation that executes it, and the measurement that sustains it.
Does your organization already know how culturally prepared it is for circular economy? It's the question almost no one asks first, and the only one whose answer changes the order of everything else.
Bocken, N. M. P., de Pauw, I., Bakker, C., & van der Grinten, B. (2016). Product design and business model strategies for a circular economy. Journal of Industrial and Production Engineering, 33(5), 308–320.
Kirchherr, J., Reike, D., & Hekkert, M. (2017). Conceptualizing the circular economy: An analysis of 114 definitions. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 127, 221–232.
Potting, J., Hekkert, M., Worrell, E., & Hanemaaijer, A. (2017). Circular Economy: Measuring Innovation in the Product Chain. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
Reike, D., Vermeulen, W. J. V., & Witjes, S. (2018). The circular economy: New or Refurbished as CE 3.0? Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 135, 246–264.
Directive 2008/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on waste (waste hierarchy).
United Nations. 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.