Two of the most actionable sustainable business model archetypes available to companies today are the Circular Supply Chain and Product as a Service. The first closes resource loops by reusing products and materials and removing waste from production systems; the second sells access to a product's function rather than the product itself, decoupling revenue from material production. Choosing between them is not a matter of picking the "greener" option — it depends on where your company sits in the value chain, how your customers prefer to consume, and what you can realistically measure. This article explains the logic of each archetype and offers a comparative framework for evaluating strategic fit.
Circular Supply Chains: Closing the Loop for Resource Efficiency
The circular economy, as described by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who catalogued sustainable business model archetypes, is a system "designed to be restorative and regenerative in order to transition current linear production and consumption patterns to cyclical ones that remove waste from the system." Applied to the supply chain, this means rethinking how a company sources materials, manufactures goods, and recaptures value at end of life rather than letting products exit as waste.
In practice, a circular supply chain focuses on reusing products and materials, substituting recyclable or renewable inputs, and designing production so that byproducts re-enter the loop. The World Economic Forum, drawing on case studies of business transformation toward a nature-positive future, highlights concrete corporate efforts toward circular resource use, zero-waste production, and the inclusion of nature-positive objectives in corporate frameworks. The strategic logic is twofold: the model reduces exposure to resource constraints associated with non-renewable inputs, and it can increase resource productivity — more output per unit of material consumed.
The archetype suits companies with significant material throughput: manufacturers, packaging-intensive businesses, and firms whose costs are exposed to volatile commodity markets. It is fundamentally an operations-led transformation, and the NTNU researchers emphasize that archetypes can be combined across different parts of a value chain, with no one-size-fits-all approach.
