During Climate Week NYC, Bloom ESG and Apkudo brought together professionals from across the electronics value chain for a candid roundtable on circularity. On a Tuesday evening in midtown OEMs,ITADs, demanufacturers, resale marketplaces, environmental market makers and standards bodies, were all in one room. While the evening was held under Chatham House Rule, the conversation was too interesting to keep to ourselves. Here are some of the key highlights from this engaging conversation.
We’re going backwards
When Circle Economy first measured global circularity in 2018, the world was 9.1% circular. The latest Circularity Gap Report puts it at 6.9%. In other words, more than 93% of the materials entering the global economy still come from virgin sources. This value includes the economy’s total consumption of materials, ranging from fossil fuels to biomass. By weight, heavy bulk items such as sand and gravel make up the largest share.
93%
of the materials entering the global economy still come from virgin sources
However, the statistic is still worth pausing on, particularly in the context of the electronics sector. In an era of increasing technological needs across consumer and enterprise applications, we wondered: has circularity hit its ceiling?
What’s holding us back
Amongst the table, there was agreement that three bottlenecks prevent true circularity from reaching its potential.
Repairability.
Too many devices are difficult to repair. Think of an old car: when a part fails, you replace the part. Electronics should work the same way. Companies such as Back Market and Fairphone are currently working towards that direction, repair must expand to an industrial scale while remaining easily accessible. Achieving that depends on two things: how devices are repaired, and how they’re designed to begin with in the first place.
Recovery.
Products are designed to be assembled, not taken apart. Glued batteries, soldered components and ever-smaller devices make it slow and costly to separate parts and materials. When recovery isn’t considered at the design stage, too many devices go straight to shredding, because they weren’t designed to be easily repaired, harvested or separated.
Incentives.
The low-carbon value of circularity sits in the wrong place. Until recently, the market lacked a mechanism that allowed the carbon intensity attributes of refurbished hardware to influence buying decisions. Although refurbishers generate significant low-carbon processing outcomes, buyers could not capture or report those attributes when procuring hardware. The SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0, published in June 2026, changes that. Where hyperscalers procure refurbished GPUs directly, an I-TEC ™ issued against that hardware batch provides the verified emission factor needed to lower the reported carbon intensity of their Scope 3 Category 1 or Category 2 inventory, creating a direct economic incentive to recover and reuse high-value components at scale.
These discussions raised a question worth exploring: how does recovery look in the future compared to today?
Recovery still has room to scale
The room recognized that circularity is part of the solution, but not the end state. To meet increasing demand for critical metals and minerals, we will need to continue to mine for new resources.
Some of the building blocks to further scale circularity do exist. Some OEMs already take devices back and resell them. However, recovery can be complex. Breaking a phone down into circuit boards, black mass and individual materials is difficult, with each of these outputs having their own resale market. As noted above, recovery needs to be built into design.
There is also a significant technology gap in recovering critical materials. China refines most of the world’s strategic minerals, around 70% on average, and has accounted for roughly two-thirds of the growth in battery recycling capacity since 2020. On top of that, supply and processing are out of balance. Until the material coming back and the capacity to process it are in step, recovery can’t scale.
The uncomfortable answer
The most thought provoking reality of the evening was this: for circularity to scale quickly, something traumatic may have to happen first. Virgin materials become unavailable or uneconomical. Geopolitical instability puts up barriers to supply. A shock like this would force the industry to go after legacy material and not just what moves through the secondary market today. There are several examples from history where world events have forced global supply chains to reimagine and reinvest in new supply or design.
One that speaks directly to refurbishment is 1950s Cuba. When the US embargo cut off new cars and parts, Cubans kept 1950s cars running for decades through improvised repair and parts harvesting. A whole repair economy grew around improvisation. Mechanics swapped in diesel engines from Soviet, European and Asian vehicles, adapted parts from Soviet Ladas, machined components by hand, and harvested parts from cars that could no longer run.
The pressure intensified after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Cuba lost most of its oil imports and trade almost overnight, and the economy contracted sharply. The country imported large numbers of bicycles from China, converted trucks into improvised buses, and expanded urban agriculture. Estimates suggest tens of thousands of these pre-1959 cars are still on the road. It’s often cited as one of the few modern examples of an entire economy being forced into resource scarcity.
Which leaves the question none of us could fully answer: can policy get us there before a crisis does?
We feel it is better to build the capacity, drive the incentives and the repair infrastructure now, on our own terms, than scramble to build them after a shock forces our hand. What do you think?
Thank you to Apkudo for co-hosting, and to everyone who brought their candor to the table. We welcome you to join the conversation!
What do you see as the single biggest thing holding circularity back?
