The Circular Economy’s
Two Problems:Unit Economics and Scale.

Everyone agrees the circular economy is a good idea. For twenty years the case has been made in moral terms, and for twenty years circular businesses have quietly died of economics.

Not from a lack of goodwill. From two hard problems: the unit economics don't work, and they never reach scale. Usually both.

I have spent ten years of my life building these businesses. A global recycling platform used by companies in 150 countries. A resale and reuse platform for preowned goods that earned two U.S. Department of Energy prizes. A nationwide circular logistics network, backed by a global venture capital firm. I ran the incubator for new businesses at a global recycling and reuse corporation.

I have seen what kills circular businesses up close. It is almost always one of these two, and often both.

Problem one: the unit economics

In recycling, the total cost of collection, transport, sorting, and processing routinely exceeds the market price of the recovered material. Virgin material is often cheaper than recycled.

In resale, intake, grading, pricing, and listing are so labor-intensive that unit economics collapse below a certain item value.

In repair, labor and parts often cost more than replacement, so rational consumers throw things away.

And across every one of these loops, logistics is the silent killer. It consumes the largest single share of margin, because moving low-value goods backward through a system built to move high-value goods forward is brutally inefficient.

When the cost of handling a unit is higher than the unit is worth, no amount of goodwill saves the business. It is a math problem.

Problem two: scale

Even when the unit economics work, most circular businesses never reach the size where they matter. And small scale means small impact, which makes the whole thing economically implausible no matter how good the margin looks on paper.

Scale fails two ways. Sometimes adoption is slow, and customers are not choosing the circular option fast enough. Sometimes the operation itself stays small, local, and capacity-constrained, unable to handle more even when the demand is there.

A business can have healthy margins and still be a rounding error. A business can have real scale and still lose money on every unit. You need both, and they feed each other.

A grant with extra steps

The sector's answer to all of this has been subsidy. Government programs, municipal budgets, corporate ESG spending, and mandates keep circular programs alive.

I am grateful those exist. But a business model that depends on political will is not a business model. It is a grant with extra steps. When budgets tighten or administrations change, the programs die, and the operators who built on them die with them.

For the circular economy to work, circular businesses must be profitable without permission.

Why agentic AI, and why now

This is why I believe agentic AI is the most important thing to happen to the circular economy since the shipping container.

Not because AI is fashionable. Because it moves every one of these levers at once.

It fixes the unit economics. The specific costs that kill circular businesses, manual triage, grading, quoting, matching, routing, scheduling, documentation, compliance, and coordination, are exactly the costs AI collapses. Productivity rises without headcount rising, and thin-margin operations become viable.

It unlocks operational scale. The same automation lets you handle more volume, more sites, and more complexity without adding cost and headcount at the same rate.

And it helps you win customers, the right way. We build AI-powered products and programs that make you more competitive and give customers a reason to choose you, we make you discoverable when customers search with AI, and we help you plan the go-to-market.

What we are building

We are operators who experienced unit-economics and scalability problems in reverse logistics, resale, recycling, and reuse, and built the AI-powered solutions to solve them.

We use agentic AI systems to build, automate, and scale circular programs and businesses.

We work with the operators and brands that need their circular economy programs to scale and their loops to finally pay for themselves.

The circular economy does not need more believers. It needs unit economics that work and the scale to matter. That is what we build.