Article

What exactly is the circular economy? And what does it mean in practice for a company or a region?

ADEME answers with a framework of 7 pillars, organised around 3 broad areas: what economic players offer, consumer demand and behaviour, and waste management. At the centre: prevention and efficient resource management. The shorter the loop, the smaller the impact.

Why a framework of 7 pillars?

Since the industrial revolution, our economy has followed a linear model: extract → process → consume → discard. Since 1970, raw material extraction has increased 3.5-fold, exceeding 100 billion tonnes a year (UNEP, 2024). The circular economy offers a structured alternative model.

Area 1 — What economic players offer

Pillar 1: Sustainable sourcing

Building environmental and social criteria into procurement, favouring secondary (recycled) and renewable materials. Example: the Fairphone 5 uses 100% recycled rare earths and 90% recycled plastic.

Pillar 2: Eco-design

Building environmental criteria in from the design stage: "waste is a design error". Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the central tool. Example: Lesieur removed the cardboard sleeve from its mayonnaise tubes (−259 t of cardboard, −22% CO₂ emissions from the tube).

Pillar 3: Industrial and territorial ecology

Optimising material and energy flows between players in the same area: one company's waste becomes another's resources. The benchmark: the industrial symbiosis at Kalundborg (Denmark).

Area 2 — Consumption and demand

Pillar 4: Responsible consumption

Steering choices towards more durable products, for individuals (buying less and better) and professionals alike (sustainable public procurement, ESG criteria). Public procurement accounts for around 10% of GDP.

Pillar 5: Extending useful life

Extending the life of products: reuse, repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing, repurposing, second-hand. The golden rule: the shorter the loop, the better the impact.

Pillar 6: Product-service systems

Selling use rather than ownership. Examples: Signify (light as a service), Michelin (tyres by the kilometre).

Area 3 — Waste management

Pillar 7: Recycling

Reprocessing end-of-life materials so they can be fed back into a production cycle. This is a long loop, essential but not an ambition in itself. EPR schemes fund recycling in France.

The rule of loops: why the order matters

From the most to the least virtuous: Refuse → Reduce → Reuse → Repair → Refurbish → Recycle → Energy recovery. Communicating only about your recycling rate risks telling an incomplete story, or even amounting to greenwashing.

What this changes for your business

A circular economy strategy is a matter of economic resilience: pressure on raw materials, CSRD obligations, client requirements. At Circul'R, we support more than 120 organisations across all of these pillars.