Cars from Cars, Buildings from Buildings, Shoes from Shoes

At the 10th International Cradle to Cradle Congress in Berlin, one deceptively simple idea kept resurfacing across very different industries: the materials in today’s products should become the materials of tomorrow’s products. 

Cars from cars. Buildings from buildings. Shoes from shoes. Electronics from electronics. 

This is, of course, not a new definition of circularity. Cradle to Cradle has long been built on the principle that materials should circulate safely and continuously through biological and technical cycles. 

What felt both significant and encouraging in Berlin was how clearly the shift beyond individual circular products is already taking shape in practice, through business models, sector partnerships, shared infrastructure, regulation and information flows designed to keep materials circulating at meaningful scale. 

That distinction matters. A circular product can be designed inside one company. A circular economy cannot. 

Our economy is increasingly exposed to resource scarcity, volatile supply chains and geopolitical uncertainty. So the ability to keep valuable materials in circulation is becoming part of the resilience of industry itself. 

Policy is accelerating that shift, but regulation is only one part of it. The harder transformation is happening in the systems around the product: how materials are sourced and recovered, how products return, how information travels, how companies collaborate and how circular value is retained. 

For businesses, the question is becoming less whether circularity matters and more how far they are already part of the system taking shape around them. 

Design the next product into this one

“Cars from cars” sounds almost elementary. Its implications are anything but. 

Applied to mobility, it changes the question. For years, much of the debate around the future of vehicles has concentrated on how they are powered. Circularity asks an equally fundamental question about the physical substance of the car itself: what materials go into it, how they are combined and why those materials are still not routinely becoming the next generation of vehicles. 

If today’s car is also tomorrow’s material bank, disassembly, material health, separation and recovery cannot be questions left to end-of-life management. They become design criteria from the beginning. 

The same formulation travels remarkably well across sectors: buildings from buildings; shoes from shoes. 

Fashion makes the point tangible. The Congress fashion show featured C2C Certified® products including high heels from roccamore, the Danish footwear brand known for comfortable high heels, whose Traceable Collection places particular emphasis on knowing where materials come from and making that information visible. 

If the ambition is ultimately “shoes from shoes, garments from garments”, traceability, material compatibility, collection, sorting and routes back into production all have to connect. The EU policy framework developed under the Green Deal is aligning these pieces too: ecodesign requirements and Digital Product Passports under ESPR, alongside mandatory textile EPR and eco-modulated producer fees, are creating stronger incentives and infrastructure for products to be traced, recovered and cycled. 

The more useful question, therefore, is no longer simply whether a product is circular: 

Repairability is a property. Repair at scale is an operating model.

Electronics makes the resilience question particularly visible. 

Phones, computers and other electronic devices concentrate valuable and often scarce materials inside products with complex global supply chains and relatively short innovation cycles. A resilient circular economy has to keep those products and components functioning for longer while retaining access to their materials once further repair or reuse is no longer viable. 

Designing a device so that it can be repaired creates potential. It does not create a repair economy. 

For repair to become normal, diagnostics, spare parts, logistics, service capacity and viable economics all have to line up. Repartly, which is developing digital and automated approaches to electronics repair and refurbishment, offers one example of how some of that friction can be reduced. 

But the wider lesson matters more than the individual solution: 

The same principle applies to refurbishment, take-back and remanufacturing. Ahrend, the Dutch office furniture manufacturer, provides another perspective through business models designed to retain product and material value across several cycles of use rather than allowing it to end with the first sale. 

Value can increasingly sit in service relationships, retained materials, components, repairability and future cycles of use. 

Open innovation is becoming part of circular infrastructure

Some circular challenges become more tractable when companies stop trying to solve them alone. 

The print sector provides an interesting example. Janni Toft Nielsen of Danish printing company KLS PurePrint and Markus Vögeli of Swiss printing company Vögeli have both built substantial experience with Cradle to Cradle Certified®. Their companies are also collaborating through Print the Change, a cooperative created to advance circular print. 

The detailed chemistry, paper, ink and production questions deserve their own discussion. The broader significance is the emergence of private open-innovation models: companies opening selected parts of the innovation process to solve shared technical and systemic barriers, while continuing to compete in the market. 

Circularity makes this increasingly necessary. Some of the knowledge, infrastructure and market conditions required to close material loops simply cannot be built efficiently by one company alone. 

Competitive advantage may therefore depend as much on a company’s ability to participate in and shape shared systems as on what it can optimise internally. 

The next mine may be under our feet, or already in use

Circularity also changes how we think about where materials come from. 

At city level, the principle can be surprisingly literal. One example discussed in Berlin involved using excavated soil to produce construction materials locally rather than automatically treating it as material to remove. 

The insight is almost disarmingly practical: 

Before sourcing a new material, look at what is already under your feet. 

Scale that logic up and the strategic significance becomes much greater. 

Europe remains dependent on imported raw materials while enormous stocks of valuable resources are already embedded in products, buildings and infrastructure within its own economy. 

Circularity changes the question from where do we source the next tonne? to why are we allowing the tonne we already own to disappear from productive use? 

Recovering and retaining high-value materials can reduce exposure to volatile supply chains, preserve economic value, support industrial capability and strengthen resource sovereignty. 

Viewed through this lens, circularity becomes much more than an environmental proposition. It becomes a strategy for protecting the material basis on which industry depends. 

Transparency is becoming infrastructure

Materials cannot become dependable future supply if companies cannot identify what exists, where it is and what it contains. 

For years, information has been one of circularity’s persistent constraints: fragmented across suppliers, difficult to compare and often impossible for the next user, buyer or recovery operator to verify. 

That barrier is beginning to erode. 

Products supported by structured evidence and independent third-party verification are better positioned to be recognised and surfaced by algorithms and AI-assisted procurement systems. C2C Certified® products provide one example of how verified sustainability information can become legible to digital systems as well as human buyers. 

That moves certification beyond disclosure. Verified data starts influencing visibility, discoverability and ultimately market access. 

As product information becomes searchable, comparable and portable, transparency begins to remove barriers that have long slowed circular markets. In sectors with complex supply chains, it strengthens traceability and gives buyers stronger evidence on which to act. 

With Digital Product Passports, procurement platforms and AI-assisted search maturing, transparency itself becomes part of circular infrastructure. 

From isolated excellence to sectoral capacity

The ambition remains strikingly accessible: 

Cars from cars. 

Buildings from buildings. 

Shoes from shoes. 

Electronics from electronics. 

Around that ambition, a more sophisticated operating environment is emerging. 

Sector initiatives are bringing previously separate actors around shared material challenges. Repair and refurbishment are developing into scalable operating models. Companies are creating collaborative platforms and open-innovation structures. Regions are experimenting with local material flows. Digital systems are beginning to turn transparency into visibility and decision-making power. 

Circularity is also entering conversations about procurement, resource security, industrial competitiveness and investment. Anna Alex’s investor perspective at the Congress sharpened the commercial dimension: sustainability and circularity will increasingly be judged by their ability to generate margin, attract capital, reduce exposure to risk and create durable market value. 

For companies, this broadens the field of action considerably. 

The practical questions are becoming harder to avoid: 

• What should our product become next? 
• Can it realistically be repaired, returned, dismantled and recovered? 
• Are we retaining valuable materials or losing them after one use cycle? 
• Does the business model support another cycle? 
• Can reliable product data travel through the value chain? 
• Which partners need to be part of the system for the loop to work? 

And perhaps the most immediate question of all: 

• How far is your company already part of the shift happening around it? 

A practical entry point into the circular economy

For companies looking for a structured entry point, Cradle to Cradle Certified® is one practical way into the circular economy. The standard translates circular design principles into defined requirements across areas including Material Health and Product Circularity, providing a structured methodology for understanding current performance and progressing against the requirements of the standard. 

Companies seeking certification appoint an accredited assessment body such as Vugge til Vugge. The assessment body independently evaluates product and manufacturing information against the standard and manages the assessment process, applying the methodology consistently while the company retains responsibility for product development and improvement. 

Industry is still far from routinely producing cars from cars, buildings from buildings or shoes from shoes. An economic environment marked by cost pressure, geopolitical uncertainty and competing short-term priorities is also slowing the pace many had hoped for. 

Yet the structures required for acceleration are increasingly visible. The task now is to connect them quickly enough to match the scale of the resource, climate and economic pressures they are meant to address. 

For companies, the transition is becoming increasingly tangible. The question is no longer simply whether they have a circular ambition, but whether their products, data, partnerships and operating models are becoming part of the systems that will make circularity work at scale. 

The next phase is about turning pilots into market structures, open innovation into sector capacity, verified data into transparency that changes decisions, and material recovery into dependable future supply, until “cars from cars” ceases to sound ambitious and simply describes how industry works. 

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These reflections were informed by discussions at the 10th International Cradle to Cradle Congress in Berlin, including contributions on car-to-car material cycles from Michael Braungart; regional transformation with Robert Marlow and Frank Wolters; textiles and the C2C Fashion Show, including Signe Marie Bakka Backhaus of roccamore; electronics, repair and circular business models through the Cradle to Cradle Electronics Initiative, Repartly and Ahrend; circular print with Janni Toft Nielsen of KLS PurePrint and Markus Vögeli of Vögeli; discussions on certification, data and AI; and Anna Alex’s keynote on the commercial realities of the next sustainability decade.