The circular economy has received much attention throughout the last few years. And for good reasons as it can solve a range of core business issues in a new way while at the same time delivering much needed substantial positive environmental impact.

Although there are numerous examples of the benefit of applying a circular economy, we have seen, through years of experience implementing its principles, that many companies struggle in understanding how to adopt and convert the principles into tangible business results. Quite often, we hear things like: “Circular economy principles are sound, meaningful and appealing, but I can’t see how we can benefit from them.”  

Ouroboros’ specific expertise is creating value by working with circular economy at company level. We call it circular business, meaning working at the business economy level as opposed to at a societal macroeconomic level, when identifying and creating benefits.

Circular business is a strategic business approach that focuses on maximizing the value of the resources or materials a company uses including raw materials or components from suppliers through the customers use and to what happens after end of use. The effects of such a mind-set is plentiful and ranges from mitigating risks tied to availability and prices on raw materials, ensuring efficient use of materials and turning waste into profit, but also very importantly designing products to meet the desire of the customers—creating customizable, updated, well-functioning and hazard free products and solutions.

There are off course academic definitions of what the circular economy and its basic principles. But we often boil it down to four simple statements in plain English:

- Do more with less – classic efficiency that will save you money and use less resources

• - Use more than once – using the materials you buy more than once will save you money and reduce the overall use of resource.
• - Utilize better – once something is produced strife for optimal utilization and thus increase the value of the product for your customers with the corresponding opportunity to earn more (perhaps through getting payed for the service rather than the product) and reduce the total products needed to fulfil the demand – which again means you don’t have to spend all that time, effort and money to get the revenue.
• - Cleaner – avoiding polluting your raw materials with harmful substances to the extent possible will reduce off gassing and thus remove a burden form your customers as well as open up opportunities for harvesting and reusing the value of the materials after end use.

Examples of circular business can be found across a broad span of sectors and the figure below shows a simple overview of the essential opportunities. There is no single solution, no silver bullet in pursuing a circular business, and in this circle,  we will present and demonstrate different types of value creation.