circular-economy
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The Thrift Store Is the Front Door. The Real Product Is Work.
Goodwill Southern California runs a circular machine with two outputs: second chances for donated goods and practical routes into employment. The familiar blue bins and thrift racks are only the public-facing half of the system.
The Quiet Subscription Empire Behind the Broken Washing Machine
Domestic & General built a billion-pound business around the moment a fridge stops humming. Its real product is not a warranty - it is the network, data and recurring relationship that make an ordinary household crisis fixable.
The Danish Company Betting That Microbes Can Do What Chemistry Can't
Novozymes and Chr. Hansen spent a century turning bacteria and enzymes into industrial ingredients. In 2024 they became one company - and quietly one of the biggest biotech businesses you have never heard of.
The 5 Million-Stop Machine Turning Trash Into Infrastructure
Republic Services makes roughly 5 million pickups a day. Behind each stop is a carefully linked business of routes, landfills, laboratories, recycling plants and energy projects - an unglamorous network becoming a platform for circular materials.
The Strange, Useful Machine Behind a $200 Pawn Loan
EZCORP has built a continent-spanning business around a simple exchange: bring in something valuable, leave with cash. The same counter also feeds a secondhand retail network - one object, two businesses, and a revealing view of the modern household budget.
IKEA
How a Swedish teenager's mail-order side hustle became the world's largest furniture retailer - and why the whole thing runs on flat boxes, cheap Allen keys, and a foundation that answers to no shareholder.
America's Thrift Stores
America's Thrift Stores built a regional retail machine out of the things people no longer want. Its real product is not merely secondhand goods - it is a fast, organized loop connecting closets, store floors, bargain hunters, charities and the waste stream.
Assurant
You may never shop for Assurant, yet it may already be standing behind your phone, car, apartment or mortgage. The $12.8 billion company has built a business out of everything that happens after the sale.
ArcelorMittal
ArcelorMittal sells the material beneath modern life - then confronts the carbon bill attached to making it. Its next act is a high-stakes rebuild of steel, powered by scrap, electricity, research and a supply chain few rivals can match.
B-Stock
B-Stock turned retail's awkward back room - returns, trade-ins and excess goods - into a data-rich B2B market. Its real product is not the pallet. It is a faster, more legible second life for inventory.
AER Worldwide
AER Worldwide turns a corporation's retired laptops, servers and circuit boards into three things executives can use: verified data destruction, recoverable value and a cleaner audit trail.
Bateriku.com
Battery Replacement & Roadside Assistance Anywhere in Malaysia - enjoy free delivery as fast as 30 minutes, free inspection and free installation.
Circular
Circular is a Singapore-based, Y Combinator-backed startup that lets people and businesses subscribe to premium tech devices - iPhones, MacBooks, iPads, ThinkPads - for a flexible monthly fee instead of buying them outright. When a subscription ends, the device is returned, refurbished, and passed on to the next customer, aiming for roughly six subscription cycles before recycling. The model spreads the cost of a device across several users, undercuts retailer payment plans, and keeps working electronics out of landfills.
Revise Robotics
Revise Robotics builds AI-enabled robotic systems that test, refurbish, and resell used electronics, starting with laptops. Its machines slot into e-waste recycling and IT asset disposition facilities, where they inspect devices, wipe drives, photograph units, and list them on online marketplaces - hundreds of laptops a day, across any model, manufacturer, or operating system, without human intervention. Founded in 2024 by Rupesh Jeyaram and Antonio Monreal and backed by Y Combinator (W25), the New York company aims to unlock the residual value trapped in discarded electronics and keep more devices out of landfills.
GOLDEX GLOBAL
GOLDEX GLOBAL builds the world's first mass-produced robotic terminal for automatically assaying, buying, selling, pawning and storing gold and silver. Its self-service kiosks - branded Goldomat and ATM-Pawnshop - combine X-ray spectrometry, hydrostatic weighing and AI to appraise jewellery, coins and scrap in roughly 3-5 minutes and pay customers instantly to a bank card. The company pairs the hardware with management software, a vending line for investment bars and coins, and a blockchain layer for gold tokenization, positioning itself at the intersection of physical precious metals and digital finance.
Mawaad Environmental Services
Mawaad Environmental Services (MES) is a Dubai-based materials processing and resource-recovery company founded in 2018 by Ismail Fahmy. It turns industrial by-products - chiefly the slag left over from steelmaking - into marketable construction materials such as steel slag aggregates and ladle furnace slag. Operating on a cradle-to-cradle circular-economy model across the GCC and Egypt, MES holds long-term processing agreements with steel producers including Emirates Steel and Ezz Steel, and reported processing and selling 300,000 tons of steel slag in the first half of 2021.
Evolved By Nature
Evolved By Nature is a Boston-area biotechnology company that turns discarded silkworm cocoons into a liquid, renewable protein platform called Activated Silk. From that platform it builds a library of natural peptides and biopolymers used as petrochemical-free alternatives across three markets: clean skincare and cosmetics ingredients, biodegradable finishes for leather and performance textiles, and injectable biomaterials for medical aesthetics. Founded in 2013 by silk-chemistry veterans Dr. Gregory Altman and Dr. Rebecca Lacouture, the company has raised roughly $190M including a $120M Series C and counts Chanel among its investors and partners.
Reima
Reima is a Finnish children's outdoor clothing company founded in 1944 that designs functional, weatherproof apparel, footwear and accessories for kids aged 0-12. Built on a mission to get every child active outdoors for at least an hour a day, Reima pairs Nordic design with technical performance - waterproof jackets, snowsuits, softshells, base layers and shoes - and has become an industry leader in sustainable, circular kidswear, cutting its emissions more than 50% since 2021 and selling in roughly 50 countries.
NorthLadder
NorthLadder is a Dubai-founded technology company that runs an auction-driven trade-in and buy-back platform for pre-owned electronics. It gives consumers instant cash for old phones and gadgets - with doorstep pickup and certified data wipes - while offering telecom operators, retailers, e-commerce players and OEMs a white-label, end-to-end trade-in engine that connects devices to a network of global buyers. By automating assessment and valuation, NorthLadder aims to unlock the residual value of used devices and extend their lifecycle in support of circular-economy goals.
Planet Protector Group
Planet Protector Group is an Australian climate-materials company that turns waste wool and recycled fibre into circular insulation. Its flagship WOOLPACK product replaces polystyrene in cold-chain packaging for food, wine and pharmaceuticals, while a newer building-insulation line extends the same wool, denim and recycled-poly technology into construction. Founded in 2016 by Joanne Howarth, the company has diverted thousands of tonnes of waste wool from landfill, eliminated millions of polystyrene boxes and returned millions in new revenue to sheep farmers across Oceania.
Polymateria
Polymateria is a London-based materials science company that has developed Biotransformation, a masterbatch additive that lets everyday polyolefin plastics fully biodegrade in the open environment within about a year - breaking down into a wax that microbes consume, leaving only CO2, water and biomass with no microplastics. Its technology underpins the BSI PAS 9017 standard and is sold to converters and brands worldwide through its consumer-facing Lyfecycle brand.
Rekosistem
Rekosistem is a Jakarta-based clean- and climate-tech company that manages Indonesia's fragmented waste supply chain end to end. Through a network of Reko Waste Stations, app-based pickup services, and material recovery hubs, it collects, sorts, and channels waste from households and businesses back into the circular economy. Founded in 2021 by Ernest Layman and Joshua Valentino, the company serves 90,000+ households and 200+ enterprise clients, processes roughly 4,500 tonnes of waste per month, and raised a US$7M Series A in 2025 led by Saratoga Investama Sedaya and K3 Ventures.
Safi
Safi is a climate-tech company building software for the recycling industry. It launched in 2021 as TrueCircle and first operated the recycling sector's first digital B2B marketplace, matching international buyers and sellers of recyclable plastics, paper and metals with quality verification, logistics and embedded financing. The company reached more than $40M in annualized GMV within its first year. It has since sharpened its focus on AI-powered quality control - a computer-vision product that turns a phone photo of a bale into instant composition data for PET, HDPE and aluminium cans, helping recyclers price and plan material more accurately. Led by CEO Rishi Stocker, Safi raised a $19.5M Series A in 2023 and works with recyclers across dozens of countries.
6K
6K is a North Andover, Massachusetts advanced materials company that uses its proprietary UniMelt microwave plasma technology - which reaches roughly 6,000 degrees, hence the name - to produce battery cathode materials and additive-manufacturing metal powders faster, cleaner, and with fewer processing steps than conventional methods. Spun out of research at MIT and the University of Connecticut, the company operates through two divisions, 6K Energy (battery cathode active materials) and 6K Additive (sustainably sourced metal powders), and is building a domestic U.S. supply chain for critical materials backed by federal grants and more than $348 million in venture funding.
Arduro
Arduro is a Pennsylvania-based recovered materials company that uses a patented, low-temperature chemical devulcanization process to reclaim high-quality carbon black, rubber and silica from end-of-life tires and industrial rubber waste. Its process breaks the sulfur cross-links in vulcanized rubber without cutting the carbon-carbon polymer backbone, letting manufacturers replace virgin raw materials with recovered ones at comparable performance and lower carbon footprint. Its first commercial product, ELDARIX r1000 recovered carbon black, is PAH-compliant and 6PPD-free.
CurbWaste
CurbWaste is a New York-based vertical SaaS platform built for independent waste and dumpster haulers. Founded by fourth-generation hauler Mike Marmo, it unifies order management, online ordering, real-time dispatch, driver mobile apps, inventory and asset tracking, automated invoicing and payments, and data reporting into a single cloud system. The platform aims to become the system of record for the fragmented waste industry, serving roughly 150 haulers across 40 states, and raised a $28M Series B in October 2025 to expand AI-driven route optimization and business intelligence.
Divert, Inc.
Divert, Inc. is a Concord, Massachusetts impact technology company on a mission to prevent food from being wasted. Founded in 2007, it pairs data-driven prevention software with reverse logistics and a network of anaerobic digestion facilities that turn unsold and non-donatable food into renewable natural gas and soil amendment. Divert serves more than 7,800 retail and industrial customer locations - including Kroger, Albertsons, Target, CVS and Ahold Delhaize - and reached a valuation of over $1 billion following a 2026 Series C led by Mitsubishi Corporation.
Infinitum
Infinitum is an Austin, Texas company reinventing the electric motor. Founded in 2016 by Ben Schuler, it replaced the century-old iron-and-copper stator with a printed circuit board (PCB) stator, producing air core motors that are roughly 50% smaller and lighter, use 66% less copper, and consume about 10% less energy than conventional motors. Its Aircore EC motor system integrates a variable frequency drive and targets HVAC fans and pumps, data center cooling, industrial equipment, power generation and mobility. Backed by more than $385M in funding and partners such as Rockwell Automation, Infinitum was named to Fast Company's 2025 list of the World's 50 Most Innovative Companies, ranking No. 1 in energy.
TULU
TULU is a proptech company that turns underused lobby and common space in apartment and student-housing buildings into 24/7 on-demand rental hubs. Through IoT-based units and a mobile app, residents can rent or buy brand-name products - from vacuums and e-scooters to VR headsets and household consumables - without owning them. Founded out of MIT's DesignX by Yishai Lehavi and Yael Shemer, the company pairs physical smart units with an AI layer that personalizes inventory per building, and it has served more than 500,000 residents across dozens of cities in North America and Europe.
Vericool Inc.
Vericool is a Livermore, California packaging manufacturer that makes plant-based, curbside-recyclable and compostable thermal shippers designed to replace Styrofoam (EPS foam) in cold-chain shipping. Founded in 2015 by Darrell Jobe, the company builds insulated coolers and liners from recycled paper fiber and other renewable materials, sells to food-service, grocery, meal-delivery and pharmaceutical customers, and is known for a second-chance hiring model that employs formerly incarcerated people.