Report

Faced with mounting geopolitical pressures, volatile raw material prices and growing regulatory requirements, French and European industry is confronted with structural vulnerabilities that the linear model can no longer absorb.

The transition to a strong circular economy is therefore no longer a peripheral strategic option, but a condition of operational resilience and lasting competitiveness.

It is in this context that Circul'R and CEA ISEC, with the support of the French Directorate General for Enterprise (DGE), launched the Circular Industry Coalition: the first collective initiative of French industrial companies structured around an explicit objective: to make strong circularity an industrial standard.

What is the Circular Industry Coalition?

The Circular Industry Coalition is a cross-sector cooperation platform bringing together nine major industrial companies - Alstom, Equans, Forvia, Legrand, Rexel, RTE, Safran, Groupe SEB and Thales - around a shared conviction: the challenges of the circular transition go beyond the scope of any single company and call for a collective response, structured and grounded in industrial realities.

It rests on three complementary pillars:

• Research and expertise: provided on the one hand by CEA ISEC, whose grounding in applied industrial research guarantees the technical rigour of the coalition's work, and on the other by Circul'R, a circular economy expert that has supported more than 100 large companies on these topics over the past ten years.
• Industrial mobilisation: members commit to shared operational work, in strict compliance with competition law, to identify solutions that can be pooled and to accelerate their deployment at scale.
• Dialogue with public authorities: the coalition does not confine itself to developing internal practices. It puts concrete proposals to public decision-makers in order to co-build the regulatory, fiscal and operational frameworks needed to scale up the industrial circular economy.

Why is cross-sector cooperation a necessary condition?

Several of the obstacles currently holding back circularity in industry are collective by nature. Three examples illustrate this:

• Material traceability only creates value if it is shared along the whole value chain - suppliers, subcontractors and end-of-life operators included. Deploying it effectively presupposes common standards that the market alone does not spontaneously produce.
• Structuring value chains for critical secondary materials - rare earths, copper, complex alloys - requires sufficient aggregated demand to justify the necessary investment. In Europe, less than 1% of rare earths are currently recycled, and the secondary material use rate rose only from 11.2% to 12.2% between 2015 and 2024, far short of the 23% target set for 2030.
• Developing use-based and remanufacturing models - PSS, performance contracts, industrial leasing - requires contractual frameworks, accounting valuation mechanisms and tax arrangements that do not yet exist in fully developed form. Building them presupposes collective experimentation and structured dialogue with the relevant public institutions.

Results of the Circular Industry Coalition's first year of work

Between 2025 and March 2026, coalition members carried out their work using a three-stage method.

• A shared diagnosis of systemic vulnerabilities, making it possible to align how value chains are read across industrial companies from different sectors. Four structural risks were documented: geopolitical tensions over supply, volatile material and energy prices, the criticality of strategic resources, and instability in the European regulatory framework.
• A mapping of the barriers to strong circularity, covering the entire industrial life cycle - from the design phase (no systematic ecodesign, a lack of common standards) to end-of-life recovery (technical limits of recycling for complex materials, insufficiently developed downstream markets).
• A portfolio of ten structuring projects, prioritised collectively, covering in particular as-a-service models, remanufacturing value chains, cooperation on strategic materials, training for operational teams and the development of contractual tools suited to circular logics.

This work led to the publication, in March 2026, of the report "Facing systemic vulnerabilities: building a competitive, sovereign industry through a strong circular economy".

The seven measures the Circular Industry Coalition is proposing to public authorities

At the end of its first year of work, the coalition set out a policy position for public authorities, built around seven concrete measures:

1. Mobilise national funding to accelerate the circularisation of industry
2. Secure access to critical secondary materials through a national flow management strategy
3. Create a "Circular Territorial Zones" programme to pool infrastructure at local level
4. Structure a national strategy on secondary material flows in order to reduce import dependency
5. Set up a regulatory sandbox on end-of-waste status, a major bottleneck for many industrial reuse projects
6. Pilot accelerated depreciation for use-based models, to correct their competitive disadvantage against traditional sales models
7. Introduce a circular VAT rate on certain industrial activities - repair, remanufacturing - to correct the tax distortion that currently penalises these practices relative to buying new

Outlook for 2026: three operational workstreams

The coalition's second year is about moving into action. It brings together 12 industrial companies - including Nexans, Equans, Vinci, Eiffage and EDF - around two priority workstreams:

• Structuring the second life of electrical and energy equipment, with the aim of demonstrating the economic and technical feasibility of refurbishment at industrial scale for high-value equipment.
• Defining and measuring circular revenue, by developing indicators that allow each member to assess the circular share of its business and establish a direct link between circular initiatives and economic performance - a necessary condition for embedding circularity durably in executive-level trade-offs.

Circul'R supports industrial companies through their circular transition

Since 2016, Circul'R has supported companies and territories on their way to the circular economy. In the industrial sector, our engagements cover circularity audits, ecodesign, business model development, partner sourcing for industrial symbioses and the facilitation of multi-stakeholder coalitions.