In August 2026, Sur La Table announced Second Servings, a branded peer-to-peer resale marketplace built with Archive Resale Inc.1 The platform is an online marketplace serving the U.S. market for eligible pre-owned kitchenware, home goods, and dining products from Sur La Table and the brands it carries. Sellers ship with prepaid labels, and prices are set based on item condition. They can choose to receive either 70 percent of the sale price in cash or 100 percent in Sur La Table store credit, creating a built-in incentive to route resale participants back into the primary retail business.2

Resale-as-a-service, or RaaS, is the model behind that launch. Instead of a brand building its own resale marketplace, a third-party provider supplies the platform, payments, logistics, and customer support, while the brand supplies demand, trust, and merchandising rules. Apparel has been the beachhead for this model, but Second Servings is another sign that branded resale is beginning to spread to other categories.

Several RaaS companies compete to serve brands. Archive launched in February 2021, founded by Emily Gittins and Ryan Rowe. The company’s goal was to give clothing and footwear brands more control over their own secondhand sales.3 Treet followed later that year, initially built around a single denim brand before expanding to get direct-to-consumer labels into resale in under a week. Trove has the longest history of the three. It started in 2012 as Yerdle, a peer-to-peer sharing platform. It rebranded as Trove in 2016, focused on apparel resale for clients like Patagonia and Levi’s.

The Sur La Table example illustrates why this competition matters. Second Servings is more than a sustainability play. It is a circular logistics and customer-retention mechanism that turns extended product life and repeat purchasing into complementary objectives rather than trade-offs.

The circular division of labor

To understand how Second Servings operates, it helps to look at who controls what. Sur La Table controls the consumer proposition: its brand, customer relationship, eligible assortment, merchandising, store-credit incentive, and the commercial objective of reconnecting resale participants to the primary business. Archive supplies the resale operating system: marketplace workflows, payment rails, seller payouts, prepaid-label logistics, customer support, and the transaction infrastructure needed to operate a peer-to-peer market at scale.

In the past, a brand that wanted a branded resale channel had little choice but to build it itself. Standing up a seller marketplace, a payments stack, a shipping-label workflow, and a resale-specific support operation internally was costly, slow, and beyond the realistic capabilities of most specialty retailers, which is one reason why relatively few attempted. With RaaS providers, that constraint has changed: brands now have a genuine build-versus-buy choice, using specialized infrastructure to launch faster and at lower operational risk than a full in-house marketplace build would normally allow.

A circular division of labor is now emerging in circular commerce. Brands supply demand, trust, product knowledge, and merchandising context. RaaS providers supply the operating backbone. Generic marketplaces such as eBay or Facebook Marketplace cannot easily replicate the brand side of that equation. They do not have Sur La Table’s first-party product catalog, category expertise, store-credit lever, or direct relationship with the buyer and seller. That asymmetry is what makes branded resale attractive, and it is what RaaS companies can provide.

For a fuller account of how this division of labor emerged from the apparel industry, see my earlier piece on the rise of resale-as-a-service.4

To date, most coverage has treated branded-resale announcements as individual launches. They are better understood as evidence of a broader competitive shift in circular-commerce infrastructure.

Two axes of competition

As the RaaS model evolves, how are providers competing? The answer is not one race but two intersecting races.

Some providers are moving primarily along the category axis, taking branded resale into new areas such as connected fitness equipment, kitchenware, furniture, and bedding. Others are moving mainly along the geographic axis, extending the same basic infrastructure across countries and regulatory systems, often through acquisition. A few are making moves on both axes, but so far no single provider is leading with equal intensity in both category diversification and cross-border scale.

Here is a simplified view of how the three providers discussed here are moving along those axes:

The differences across RaaS providers indicate they are building capability in different directions rather than converging on a single playbook. That matters because the competition is expanding the set of operational solutions brands can use: category-specific trust and logistics, returns recovery, trade-in incentives, and cross-border deployment.

Axis one: category expansion

Archive offers the clearest visible evidence that RaaS is moving beyond the operating assumptions of apparel resale.

In addition to the Sur La Table project, Archive built Peloton’s Repowered, a peer-to-peer marketplace for used Peloton Bikes, Treads, and Rows, launched in 2025. Sellers receive a flat 70 percent of the sale price in cash.5 It’s a single payout rate, unlike Second Servings’ cash-or-credit choice. Buyers receive a reduced activation fee for used equipment. Each listing includes a Peloton History Summary that can show information such as usage, service history, warranty information, and equipment age. These are category-specific details that build confidence in a high-ticket, connected product. The program also uses serial-number identification, condition questions that cover mechanical issues and repair history, and an interface that supports local pickup or delivery for bulky items.

This is more than Archive's apparel-resale formula applied to a new category. Connected fitness hardware has category-specific resale challenges. The product is large and high-ticket. Delivery or pickup can be difficult. Its value is partly physical and partly linked to digital accounts, services, and membership. Condition verification, maintenance history, account transfer, and buyer confidence all matter in ways that they generally do not for a used sweater. Archive’s work with Peloton drove the development of a connected-product trust architecture that future brands can reuse.

Sur La Table’s Second Servings also faces a different set of category-specific problems than apparel. Cookware and bakeware can be bulky, fragile, or heavy to ship. Knives and small electrics raise safety, condition, hygiene, and accessory-completeness questions. Food-contact surfaces, product age, missing lids or attachments, and the boundary between cosmetic wear and functional deterioration all matter to the buyer. To develop Second Servings, Archive had to address these issues with category-specific condition guidance, packaging expectations, and safety and hygiene standards.

Trove and Treet offer additional evidence of category expansion. Trove has added furniture retailer Lovesac to its client roster, taking on the challenge of recommerce for bulkier home-goods categories where delivery, damage risk, and room layout all affect secondary value. Treet’s work with ettitude is also instructive. ettitude re:new is not simply a peer-to-peer marketplace for bedding. It combines trade-in, returns recovery, inspection, cleaning, repackaging, and resale into a single, platform-coordinated flow.6 That matters because bedding raises questions about hygiene, inspection, cleaning, repackaging, return disposition, and material recovery. RaaS is not just another online listing interface but must also often engage in reverse logistics and circular operations.

Axis two: geographic expansion

Trove’s strongest recent competitive move has less to do with product category than geography.

In 2025, Trove acquired reverse.supply, a German branded-resale platform.7 The acquisition established Trove’s European headquarters in Berlin, retained reverse.supply’s regional team, and extended its stated reach across roughly 30 countries in North America and Europe, according to the companies. It also brought reverse.supply’s European client relationships, including brands such as ARMEDANGELS, Decathlon, Bergzeit, and Hessnatur, into Trove’s platform.

The reverse.supply deal followed Trove’s 2024 acquisition of U.S. competitor Recurate.8 That deal added peer-to-peer resale, Shopify integration, and an operational network while consolidating Trove’s domestic position. Trove said it would command more than 75 percent of total U.S. branded-resale traffic after the acquisition.9 Together, the Recurate and reverse.supply acquisitions demonstrate Trove's strategy of building scale through acquisition rather than organic growth. It is acquiring capabilities, customer relationships, and regional operating knowledge, enabling it to extend geographic reach faster than it could by developing each market from scratch.

Trove explicitly connected its European move to changing producer-responsibility, right-to-repair, take-back, and circularity requirements. These are exactly the sort of policy-driven pressures that push brands toward more circular platform arrangements. That does not make a resale provider the compliance layer. Brands remain responsible for complying with the law. RaaS providers become valuable implementation partners by supplying transaction infrastructure, reverse-logistics workflows, local operating knowledge, and data capabilities needed to operationalize circular programs across markets.

Implications for brands

Branded resale is growing but RaaS providers are taking different routes toward expanding the market.

Archive is testing how far a reusable resale core can travel across radically different product-trust and transaction problems within the United States. Trove is demonstrating how resale infrastructure can be regionalized quickly through acquisition, using local expertise to address multi-country operations and changing policy environments. Treet sits earlier on both axes, but its ettitude work is a useful reminder that category expansion can also mean integrating resale with returns recovery and reverse logistics.

A brand entering a less standardized product category will find Archive’s recent Peloton and Sur La Table work especially relevant. A brand prioritizing multi-country deployment and European operating presence will put greater weight on Trove’s reverse.supply acquisition and Berlin-based team. A brand trying to turn returns from a cost center into a resale and recovery channel will find Treet’s ettitude model instructive.

The market has not yet produced one provider optimized for every category, operating model, and geography. This gives brands meaningful choices among differentiated partners rather than a commoditized field of interchangeable vendors, and it expands the overall capability frontier of circular commerce.

Conclusion

RaaS competition is creating new circular capabilities that brands can leverage. Think of this as a capability dividend for the circular economy. Competition is enlarging the ways in which recommerce can operate, across more categories, more business models, and more markets. Policy can create mandates and market signals; competing providers develop the innovation and operational capabilities needed to act on them.

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Circularity is no longer a liberal, environmentalist project. It is becoming a realist instrument of national power and competition. Since it entered mainstream policy discourse, the circular economy has been framed as a way to decouple growth from resource use, cut waste, and build a cooperative, rules-based green economy. That framing has not disappeared, but it now must contend with harder-edged national security priorities. Across a growing number of countries, circular economy policy is explicitly designed to secure resources, harden supply chains, and support national material independence under conditions of geopolitical rivalry.

This article explains the shift and its implications. It first defines the circular economy and realist strategy, then shows how circularity has been securitized in Europe and examines China as a clear case of circular realism in practice. It concludes by considering what this means for how states will compete.

Liberal origins of circularity

The circular economy is an alternative to the take-make-waste model. Products, components, and materials are kept in use for as long as possible, and waste is designed out of the system. It rests on three design principles: eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials at their highest value through repair, reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling, and regenerate natural systems.1

This systems framing was popularized over the past decade by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and reinforced by the World Economic Forum’s “Towards the Circular Economy” reports and initiatives like the Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE), which cast circularity as a systems-level response to global resource and climate constraints rather than a tool of state power.2 In its original form, circularity sat comfortably inside liberal environmentalism, where multilateral governance, shared standards, and market incentives should internalize ecological costs. The EU’s first Circular Economy Action Plan, in 2015, described the transition as “an essential contribution” to a sustainable, low-carbon, competitive economy, with the emphasis squarely on innovation, jobs, and environmental protection rather than security.3

What is realism?

Realist international relations theory starts from a different premise. It sees states operating in an anarchic system with no higher authority to guarantee their survival, so they must rely on their own material capabilities. Autonomy, self-sufficiency, and control over vulnerabilities matter more than shared norms or institutions. Where liberal theory emphasizes cooperation and interdependence as ways to manage scarcity, realist theory emphasizes control and the management of vulnerability.4

Control over critical inputs, such as energy, food, minerals, advanced manufacturing materials, now sits at the center of realist analyses of economic statecraft. In this view, trade, finance, technology, and supply chains are not neutral channels of exchange. They are instruments of power.5 This is where circularity enters the frame. By turning domestic waste streams into reliable input flows, a state expands its effective resource endowment without depending on suppliers it cannot control. This fit is not accidental. Circularity is a direct answer to a realist problem: how to reduce exposure to external shocks, embargoes, and supply disruptions in strategically important sectors.

The thesis: from eco-efficiency to security infrastructure

The reframing did not happen all at once; it moved through three stages, visible, for example, in the EU’s policy language.

First came the sustainability stage, epitomized by the 2015 Circular Economy Action Plan.6 Then came a resilience and competitiveness stage: the 2020 “new Circular Economy Action Plan” linked circularity directly to long-term EU competitiveness, positioning it as structural economic reform rather than only a green agenda.7 Now the EU has moved into a third, explicitly securitized stage: circularity is treated as a matter of economic security and strategic autonomy, not just environmental policy.

Recent Commission communications describe the circular economy as “essential to Europe’s economic security, resilience and competitiveness,” and a forthcoming Circular Economy Act is designed to build a single market for secondary raw materials.8 The Clean Industrial Deal links circularity directly to reducing “overdependencies on third-country suppliers.” As one European security-policy debate put it, raw material sovereignty is now treated as security and defense policy.9

This is securitization in the technical sense used in security studies: an issue is redefined as an existential threat, which justifies exceptional measures. Once applied to circularity, waste, secondary materials, and recycling capacity stop being environmental performance indicators and become strategic assets, to be retained, protected, and in some cases shielded from export.

The intellectual and policy shift is from circularity as a contribution to a global commons toward circularity as the design of controlled national loops insulated from external volatility. Scholars and analysts now describe the resulting policy posture as “circular resource nationalism”: states asserting sovereign control over secondary materials and the technologies that process them, treating export controls on waste streams and domestic recycling targets as security measures rather than environmental ones.10

Table 1 presents key dimensions of the circular economy when viewed through the liberal environmental lens verses the realist security lens.

No state illustrates the finished version of this shift better than China.

China: circularity as resource security

China introduced circular economy concepts into national policy in the early 2000s and gave them legal form with the 2008 Circular Economy Promotion Law (subsequently updated), which defined circularity as a national framework for reduction, reuse, and recycling across production, circulation, and consumption.11 Successive Five-Year Plans upgraded circularity from a regulatory theme to a development strategy, with the 13th and 14th plans setting explicit targets for resource productivity, recycling rates, and growth of the recycling industry.

The 14th Five-Year Circular Economy Development Plan (2021–2025) states plainly that circular economy development is of “remarkable significance” for ensuring national resource security and describes recycling as “an important way of resources security protecting.” It sets hard targets: a 20 percent improvement in resource productivity over 2020 levels, alongside specific utilization goals for construction waste, scrap steel, waste paper, and recycled non-ferrous metals.12

Circularity operationalizes China's broader "dual circulation" strategy — internal circulation anchored in domestic demand and innovation, paired with selective external engagement. This strategy was explicitly framed as a response to a more hostile external environment and Western technology restrictions.13 By raising resource productivity and building large-scale recycling industries, China reduces its exposure to external raw material shocks in exactly the sectors realist analysts treat as constraints on national power: battery materials, vehicle life-cycle management, and electronics recovery, all of which feed clean energy systems, consumer technology, and defense-relevant manufacturing. In practice, this makes circularity a core component of China’s economic security strategy: an internal balancing measure (building capability at home rather than relying on alliances or global markets) that helps Beijing maintain industrial output and technological upgrading even under sanctions, export controls, or supply disruptions.

The clearest signal of where this is heading is China's newly released 15th Five-Year Plan for circular economy development (2026–2030), which frames the circular economy as a core pillar of national development strategy — targeting an 8-trillion-yuan resource recycling industry by 2030 and globally leading resource-utilization efficiency by 2035.14 It targets the utilization of around 4.5 billion tons of bulk solid waste annually and the recycling of roughly 510 million tons of major renewable resources by 2030, with each ton framed as a direct reduction in import dependency. This is not sustainability language. It is the language of strategic reserves.

Implications

If circularity is becoming a realist instrument in China, it is not doing so in isolation. A similar reframing is emerging across advanced economies, from Germany’s National Circular Economy Strategy to Japan’s circular economy for resource security agenda to new U.S. restrictions banning the export of certain critical materials.

Three broad implications follow for how circularity will evolve as it is pulled into national security and economic statecraft.

1. Circularity will be absorbed into economic and national security programs. The first implication is institutional. The circular economy will increasingly sit inside security and economic statecraft portfolios, not just environment or industrial policy ministries. Germany’s National Circular Economy Strategy explicitly frames circularity as a way to secure raw material supply, strengthen resilience, and reduce dependence on imports, positioning secondary raw materials as part of Germany’s resource security architecture.15 Japan’s business and policy elites now describe the circular economy as central to recycling strategic resources domestically and to ensuring Japan’s autonomy, placing circularity alongside national stockpiles and diversification of supply as core economic security measures.16

In the United States, critical minerals strategies and supply chain resilience initiatives increasingly highlight recycling and recovery of strategic materials as security issues rather than purely environmental goals. As this logic spreads, defense ministries, economic security councils, and trade agencies will treat domestic recycling, remanufacturing, and “urban mines” as strategic infrastructure.17 They will assess circular capacity the way they once assessed stockpiles and refineries.

2. Circular resource nationalism will gain ground. The second implication is political: circular resource nationalism, the protectionist twin of circular realism, will become more prominent. It is already visible in Europe’s and Asia’s moves to retain more end-of-life products and secondary materials within their territories and to build circular value chains that minimize outflows of critical resources. Germany’s National Circular Economy Strategy explicitly targets raw material supply security and “raw material sovereignty,” including goals for covering a significant share of strategic raw material demand through recycling.18 Japanese industry proposals call for tighter control over the outflow of e-scrap and secondary materials, reinforcing enforcement against illicit exports and emphasizing the need to retain secondary resources at home as part of resource security.19

In parallel, China’s sequenced export controls on gallium, germanium, antimony, and rare earths demonstrate how control over primary and processed materials can be wielded as leverage, and new U.S. restrictions banning the export of certain critical materials show the same logic is no longer confined to Beijing. This sets a precedent that other states may extend to secondary materials as circular capacity grows. The likely result is more licensing regimes for secondary raw materials, more scrutiny of scrap and e-waste exports, and more domestic content requirements for recycled inputs in strategic sectors: a circular-economy analogue to export bans and local content rules.

3. Material loops will become matters of national interest. The third implication is structural: states will increasingly treat material loops as matters of national interest, and in some domains as quasi-sovereign spaces. Circular economy strategies in Germany, the EU, Japan, and others already emphasize design for disassembly, extended producer responsibility, digital product passports, and data infrastructures to track and optimize material flows. These measures are justified not only on environmental grounds but as ways to conserve natural resources, ensure a supply of raw materials, including critical ones, and enhance the resilience of national economies.

As more states redesign their circular systems as controlled national loops rather than shared global cycles, the relatively open global trade in secondary materials is likely to fragment. Design standards, liability regimes, and product passport requirements will increasingly be driven by security and resource sovereignty concerns, and the countries best positioned to benefit will be those that already have scale in domestic collection, sorting, and reprocessing infrastructure.

Taken together, these trends mean circularity is moving from the periphery of national strategy to its core: a central instrument through which states pursue economic security, manage vulnerability, and exercise power in a resource-constrained, geopolitically contested world.

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Sources

This white paper examines how digital platforms now underpin the circular electronics economy, turning retired devices into structured flows of resale, refurbishment, repair, rental, and responsible recovery across more than 30 countries. Circular electronics is not a single market. It is a set of coordination problems, spanning trust, pricing, logistics, and compliance, that platforms solve in different ways along the reverse lifecycle.

Rather than focusing on primary markets for new devices, this study looks at the infrastructure that keeps electronics and their materials in productive use after first ownership ends. Retired smartphones, laptops, and servers move through secondary markets, service networks, and recovery systems that collectively unlock hundreds of billions of dollars in unrealized value each year.

Key Takeaways

• Every year, hundreds of millions of consumer and enterprise devices are retired while still functional, locking away residual value that could be recovered through better-organized secondary markets.

• Circular electronics is structurally multi-firm: receiving, wiping, grading, refurbishing, pricing, routing, resale, repair, and material recovery require different capabilities that few organizations can build and optimize in-house.

• Platforms have emerged as market-building institutions, not just sales channels. They create trust infrastructure, price discovery, logistics integration, and compliance documentation that make circular transactions repeatable at scale.

• The paper introduces a taxonomy of nine circular electronics platform types, spanning peer-to-peer marketplaces, certified refurbished marketplaces, managed recommerce operators, wholesale exchanges, auction and liquidation platforms, buyback and trade-in services, rental and access platforms, repair and parts platforms, and end-of-life recovery exchanges. It draws on a proprietary database of 100 platforms operating across more than 30 countries, and traces 25 years of platform evolution.

• Analysis of the database shows that most activity is concentrated in Tier 1 consumer devices (phones, laptops, tablets), while enterprise IT, repair, rental, and end-of-life recovery remain more specialized, geographically narrow, and underdeveloped.

• The study identifies five core mechanisms through which platforms reduce transaction costs: trust infrastructure, price discovery, aggregation and matching, logistics integration, and compliance management. Different platform types combine these mechanisms in distinct ways.

• Three “unsolved” layers stand out as frontier opportunities: an integrated repair operating layer that connects parts, technicians, and consumers; a compliance-first end-of-life infrastructure that can credibly absorb liability; and capital-efficient rental and access models.

• Platform density and scale reveal where circular electronics markets are already institutionalized and where significant whitespace remains, especially around repair, enterprise IT disposition, and cross-border coordination of lifecycle data and custody.

• The central practical lesson is that the platforms already exist. The next step is adoption: helping consumers, enterprises, and policymakers see these platforms as essential infrastructure for turning unused assets into economic and environmental value.

Who Should Read This

• Platform founders, product leaders, and marketplace strategists working in recommerce, repair, rental, or recovery.

• IT asset disposition (ITAD) professionals and reverse logistics managers seeking better ways to route devices across multiple circular pathways.

• Sustainability executives and circular economy practitioners looking to understand the actual platform landscape behind secondary electronics markets.

• Enterprise asset management, procurement, and finance teams exploring how platform partnerships can turn retired IT equipment into recurring value streams.

• Policy makers, regulators, and standard-setters interested in how platforms can support compliance, transparency, and digital product passport initiatives for electronics.

Inquiries

For inquiries about the 100-platform database, please reach out to Peter Evans directly.

Subscribe to Platform Professional for ongoing insights on circular economy platforms, secondary market electronics, live-selling commerce, and the evolving infrastructure of digital product passports and enterprise resource recovery.

Download the full white paper below to explore the 100-platform database, the nine-platform taxonomy, and the emerging roadmap for the next generation of circular electronics platforms.

Download the full white paper below.

Platforms That Power Circular Electronics Economy 2026

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A new July 2026 White House directive may indirectly spur more inbound circular FDI.1 By authorizing export restrictions on recoverable critical minerals and materials (CMMs), including black mass, end-of-life rare-earth permanent magnets, swarf, and other scrap streams containing recoverable critical materials, the Administration seeks to retain more of this material in the U.S. rather than allow private companies to export it to foreign processors. The order is framed around competition with China for scrap access and the fact that the U.S. exports roughly 33,000 metric tons of e-waste per month, much of it ultimately destined for Chinese processing. One result could be that firms with strong recovery technologies, such as firms in Japan and South Korea, may invest more in the U.S.

Japanese and South Korean firms are already building a cross-sector network of U.S. circular economy assets, concentrating on electronics, critical materials, textiles, and automotive recycling and reuse. This pattern can be called circular FDI. A full definition would go like this:

Circular FDI is cross-border capital and operational commitments, including equity stakes, joint ventures, fund investments, and long term operating programs, that build the infrastructure to recover, resell, reuse, and redistribute used products and materials, rather than expanding new production capacity.

Between 2021 and mid-2026, my research shows 16 distinct transactions and initiatives fitting this pattern, with Japanese companies accounting for the majority and South Korean firms contributing a significant second wave.

These deals span four sectors: electronics, critical materials and batteries, apparel and textiles, and automotive and metals. Together they use acquisitions, joint ventures, fund investments, innovation projects, and long-term operating programs to build circular capabilities on U.S. soil. The table below summarizes the pattern; the sections that follow walk through each sector in turn.

Electronics and IT hardware: from disposal to secondary markets

In electronics, Japanese trading houses are moving into U.S. IT asset disposition (ITAD) and reuse, as well as e-waste recycling and secondary smartphone markets. Sumitomo Corporation’s strategic investment in GreenTek Solutions brings a U.S.-based ITAD and reuse player into its orbit, explicitly positioning Sumitomo inside the reverse logistics and recycling of data-center and enterprise IT equipment.2 Itochu has formed a capital and business alliance around ERI’s electronics recycling and ITAD operations,3 and separately acquired a 79.5% stake in WeSellCellular to extend its reach into U.S. used-smartphone wholesaling.4 Both moves deepen Japanese control over secondary electronics flows and the capabilities needed to manage them.

South Korea’s LG Electronics anchors the appliance side of this cluster, running a U.S. appliance take-back and recycling network as part of a program targeting the collection of eight million tons of old appliances by 2030.5 That effectively turns end-of-life devices into feedstock for future manufacturing rather than waste. Across electronics, Japanese and Korean firms are using U.S. partners to secure both physical flows (used hardware) and capabilities (ITAD, refurbishment, recycling) that they can integrate into global platform-style secondary markets.

Critical materials and batteries: securing the circular supply chain

The critical materials transactions focus on battery recycling, plastics, and closed-loop feedstock for EV and energy storage value chains. EcoPro’s memorandum of understanding with U.S. recycler Cirba Solutions aims to ramp up lithium-ion battery recycling in North America and explicitly responds to Washington’s Inflation Reduction Act by securing local scrap and recycling pathways for EV batteries.6

Japanese conglomerate Marubeni has invested $50 million into Cirba Solutions to support closed-loop battery materials,7 while South Korea’s SK Global Chemical has put capital into Closed Loop Partners’ circular plastics fund and SK Geocentric is partnering with PureCycle Technologies on an advanced recycling cluster for plastics in the U.S. These deals collectively position Japanese and Korean firms inside U.S. mid-stream circular technology, such as battery “urban mining,” plastics depolymerization, and materials recovery, rather than relying solely on imported virgin resources.

The July 2026 White House export-restriction authority on recoverable critical minerals and materials could add to this momentum by making U.S. processing capacity more valuable, especially for firms with advanced recovery technologies.

Apparel and textiles: closing loops in soft goods

In apparel and textiles, South Korea and Japan are co-investing in technologies that convert waste streams into new materials for fashion and outdoor gear supply chains. Circ’s funding round with Youngone, a South Korean apparel manufacturer, supports scaling textile recycling for apparel supply chains, turning low-value waste textiles into new fiber inputs.8 Toyota Tsusho’s alliance with U.S. recycler Bureo launches a textile recycling business based on discarded fishing nets as feedstock, demonstrating how marine plastic can be upcycled into higher-value materials.9 Naver’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Poshmark adds a major apparel resale platform to this pattern, extending Korean capital into the digital infrastructure of re-commerce as well as physical recycling. Poshmark is a social commerce marketplace for new and secondhand clothing, so the deal gives Naver a U.S. operating platform that helps extend garment life and normalize resale as a mainstream circulation channel.10

Mercari, Japan's largest secondhand marketplace, has pursued the build-rather-than-buy version of the same strategy, opening its first U.S. physical retail location in Los Angeles in 2024 and launching a new cross-border app in 2026 that gives American buyers direct access to its Japanese marketplace. Where Naver bought its way into U.S. resale infrastructure through Poshmark, Mercari is investing to build and operate its own.11

These investments support the development of regional collection systems, sorting infrastructure, and chemical or mechanical recycling technologies that can underpin circular textile platforms. By backing recyclers and material innovators instead of only brands, these investors gain upstream control over recycled fiber streams that will increasingly be needed to meet extended producer responsibility and eco-design rules in their home markets.

Automotive and metals: building circular EV ecosystems

The automotive cluster is where the circular FDI story becomes most visible, reflecting Japanese OEMs’ need to manage end-of-life vehicles (ELVs), EV batteries, and metals in a closed loop. Toyota Tsusho announced its acquisition of Radius Recycling, a North American metals and automotive recycler, at roughly $907 million, then completed the acquisition in July 2025, explicitly framed as a move to expand closed-loop metals and battery recovery across North America.12

Surrounding this deal, Toyota Motor North America has a strategic recycling agreement with Redwood Materials to create closed-loop battery circularity for EV batteries.13 Honda has launched its Resource Circularity Center in the U.S. to repurpose end-of-life equipment and parts into reusable resources.14 Toyota Tsusho’s operating initiative with battery ecosystem partners in the North American battery supply chain signals a longer-term, platform-like effort to integrate collection, recycling, and material reuse across EV production cycles.

OEM Take-back Programs

Not every circular investment shows up as an FDI-style equity stake. Alongside the acquisitions and joint ventures above, Samsung Electronics America is investing heavily in the operations and partnerships that make circular electronics work in practice through its RE+ and consumer recycling programs.

In the United States, Samsung’s RE+ and consumer recycling programs comprise a nationwide network of free drop-off locations for unwanted phones, TVs, monitors, computers, and other devices, complemented by a mail-back program for Samsung-branded products.15 Consumers can bring devices to municipal collection sites and partner locations, or request pre-paid shipping labels for mail-back through ERI, Samsung’s long-standing e-waste partner. Since 2008, the company reports that it has helped recycle more than 1.3 billion pounds of e-waste in the United States, contributing to global goals of collecting 10 million tons of devices by 2030 and 25 million tons by 2050.16

To deliver this, Samsung cooperates with a set of recycling partners including Universal Recycling Technologies, Electronic Recyclers International, MRM Recycling, and GreenChip, who run collection events, process devices, and provide state-compliant take-back services. Operationally, the RE+ program rests on three pillars: low-friction consumer access through online locators, retail and municipal drop-off sites, and mail-back options; battery and packaging circularity through Call2Recycle drop-off sites and recycling-conscious product design; and state-specific compliance programs in states such as California, New York, New Jersey, Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, often including one-to-one take-back commitments.

Samsung's RE+ program is not a new FDI transaction. Samsung Electronics America is a decades-old U.S. affiliate, and RE+ is funded through that affiliate's own operating budget rather than fresh capital from Seoul. It belongs in a different category: not new circular FDI, but evidence that circular commitments also run through the ongoing operations of firms whose U.S. presence FDI already built.

Why Japan is investing in circular capabilities overseas

Japan’s outbound circular investments are shaped by an intensifying domestic push to treat recycling of metals, plastics, and batteries as national infrastructure and an economic security priority. The Japanese government has elevated metal and plastic recycling to a national priority, framing urban mining as a way to reduce dependence on overseas resource procurement and to industrialize domestic resource circulation systems.

A new mandatory extended producer responsibility law for mobile batteries and small electronic devices, expected to take effect in fiscal 2026, will require Japanese manufacturers and importers to collect and recycle these products, turning battery-laden waste streams into material banks they must manage. Against this backdrop, Japanese firms’ investments in U.S. battery recyclers, ITAD operators, metals recyclers, and textile recyclers look like a way to secure diversified access to recycled feedstock, test business models in a large market, and import technological and operational know-how back into Japan’s emerging circular infrastructure.

Why South Korea is scaling circular FDI

South Korea is similarly embedding circular economy projects into its climate and industrial strategy, explicitly linking overseas green infrastructure investments to domestic firms’ participation in global low-carbon value chains. The Green Infrastructure Export Support Fund, launched in 2024, channels government capital into overseas projects in carbon reduction, energy transition, circular economy, and water infrastructure, with a planned fund size of roughly KRW 509.2 billion by 2029 and a mandate to mobilize private capital and export opportunities for Korean firms.17

In parallel, the K-Circular Economy Reborn Project, approved in 2026, allocates 254 billion won over seven years to support intelligent sorting, dismantling, and high-quality circular raw materials production for waste resins, ELVs, wind components, and small waste electronics. Investments by EcoPro, SK Global Chemical, SK Geocentric, and Youngone into U.S. battery, plastics, and textile recycling platforms serve as both market-entry strategies and extensions of a state-backed push to place Korean companies at the center of global circular value chains in batteries, materials, and consumer goods.18

The bigger picture

Traditional FDI targets greenfield production, market access, and cost arbitrage. The 16 transactions above are different. Every one buys into, or builds, capability not to expand new production capacity but to support reuse and recovery of products and materials. This includes a recycler, an ITAD operator, a take-back network, a recommerce marketplace, or a materials fund. That consistency across four sectors and two countries is what makes circular FDI a distinct emerging category.

The pattern also has a trigger. Resource security, climate policy, and extended producer responsibility are converging in both Tokyo and Seoul at the same time, and firms in both capitals are responding by owning circular infrastructure rather than contracting for its output.

Looking ahead, batteries and critical materials, electronics and IT hardware, plastics and textiles, and automotive and mobility all seem set to attract more circular FDI as regulations tighten and metals and other materials become more valuable. As noted above, the new export restrictions on CMMs may further encourage circular FDI.

The strategic questions remain open: should industrial policy differentiate between conventional FDI and circular FDI? Should the latter receive tailored incentives or screening? What metrics, beyond jobs and capital expenditure, should we use to evaluate it, such as material recovery, avoided virgin extraction, or lifecycle emissions? Who will ultimately govern the data and platforms that coordinate circular flows across borders as digital product passports and data spaces roll out?

As the circular economy expands in scale and scope, circular FDI is likely to become an increasingly important part of the equation.

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Footnote

AI is opening up powerful new capabilities across just about every industry. When coupled with platforms that can amass complex transactions at scale, this has tremendous potential. However, there are also limitations that are worth exploring in detail. This article explores the intersection of platforms and concierge service. This is an interesting case because concierge used to be available only to the wealthiest, given the time and challenge of arranging (and often redoing) complex itineraries.

Concierge has a long history as a service for the elite, with roots in medieval Europe and a modern form that emerged in nineteenth-century luxury hospitality. In medieval Europe, the role was associated with castles, royal households, and the management of keys, access, and guest comfort. It was embedded in systems of power, designed to help nobles and their visitors move through spaces and routines with less friction.1

The modern hotel concierge emerged later, alongside the rise of grand hotels and leisure travel in Europe. In that setting, concierge became a recognizable hospitality function: a multilingual, resourceful personal secretary who could arrange transportation, secure reservations, recommend attractions, and make travel easier for affluent guests. Concierge evolved from a role of access and guardianship into a service of coordination and convenience, and after World War II it professionalized further through organizations such as Les Clefs d’Or.2

That history matters because it shows that concierge has, at its core, been about reducing complexity for people with resources. That exclusivity was not incidental: service this personalized has always been labor-intensive to deliver, which kept it out of reach for anyone but the wealthiest. It developed as a premium layer for those who could pay for time-saving, deep specialized market knowledge, and personalized support.

AI Is Changing the Model, With Real Evidence Behind It

What is changing now is not the basic idea of personalized assistance, but the fact that AI is beginning to turn that elite service model into a platform-native capability, and the deployments backing this claim have moved well past the pilot stage.

Hilton launched the Hilton AI Planner in March 2026, a generative AI digital concierge in beta on hilton.com that uses conversational language to help guests pick destinations, compare properties, and explore amenities.3 This followed years of earlier experimentation, including the Connie robot concierge Hilton built with IBM Watson back in 2016, but the March 2026 launch represents a more focused and more capable generative AI product built directly into the guest-facing booking experience.4

Wyndham was the first major hotel company to go live on Anthropic’s Claude in 2025, and in May 2026 it launched a native ChatGPT app covering roughly 8,400 of its hotels. On the operational side, Wyndham has also used PwC and Salesforce’s Agentforce to deploy agentic AI for franchisee brand-standards management. According to PwC’s published case study, the resulting AI-powered reviews run twenty times faster than the manual process they replaced, with the bulk of the transition completed in about two months. That is a concrete, verifiable example of AI compressing a workflow that used to require significant human coordination.5

Accor and Deloitte have implemented a global cloud telephony platform combined with an AI service layer across more than 110 countries for Accor’s luxury and lifestyle brands, aimed at streamlining and automating customer service while retaining a human touch for escalations. The project addressed a structural challenge: Accor’s luxury and lifestyle portfolio had grown quickly, but the company was not natively digital, and its legacy customer service infrastructure had not kept pace. Deloitte helped design and deploy a cloud-based telephony system paired with an AI layer capable of handling routine guest requests automatically, while routing more complex cases to human agents who could preserve the personal touch luxury guests expect. The rollout was substantial in scope: the solution now spans seven contact centers and 2,000 telephony lines, and has enhanced the productivity of roughly 600 reservation agents worldwide. Accor completed the deployment in under a year, and it has also given the company greater ownership of its guest data and faster time-to-market for new service features.6

These examples matter because concierge is really about orchestration. A good concierge does not just respond. It remembers preferences, connects disparate pieces, and helps the user move through complexity with less effort. The Hilton, Wyndham, and Accor deployments show AI beginning to replicate those functions at scale, inside a single brand’s own systems.

That qualifier, inside a single brand’s own systems, is important, and it is the hinge the rest of this article turns on.

ZEAL: Building the Foundation

ZEAL Remote is a useful example of where this shift is headed.7 ZEAL has the ambition to become an AI-powered dining and travel assistant for digital nomads. Today, its product is closer to a membership community and hotel-partner network: it connects remote workers to a curated set of approved hotels for extended stays, offers community features through channels like Slack, and provides member perks rather than an autonomous AI concierge that plans, books, and adapts a full itinerary on a traveler’s behalf.

That sequencing is worth taking seriously. The hardest part of building a real concierge platform is not the AI layer. It is assembling the supplier relationships, the curated hotel network, and the trust of a community willing to hand over their preferences and travel plans in the first place. ZEAL has spent its early product life building that foundation: a vetted network of approved hotels, direct relationships with partners willing to work with the platform, and a community generating the kind of preference and behavior data that makes an eventual AI layer useful rather than generic. Most AI-concierge pitches skip straight to the automation story and never do this harder relationship-building work at all.

Seen that way, ZEAL’s current product is closer to the prerequisite than the alternative to its AI ambitions. A hotel-partner network with real integration and a community with real engagement is exactly the kind of asset base that lets an AI layer coordinate and execute rather than just recommend, which is the gap that separates most of the category’s talk from its results. ZEAL’s stated direction is a credible bet precisely because it is being built on top of relationships the company has already done the work to earn.

The Limits: Concierge Depends on Who Controls the Information

This is where the democratization story needs a harder look, because the deployments that are actually working share a common structural feature: the AI operates inside a system the deploying company already controls. Hilton’s Planner works because Hilton owns its own booking engine, its own property data, and its own guest relationship. Wyndham’s brand-standards agent works because Wyndham has direct authority over its own franchisee network. Accor’s service layer works because it sits inside Accor’s own customer service infrastructure across its own brands.

None of these examples require the AI to coordinate across suppliers that the platform does not own and cannot control. That is the important distinction, and it is where the limits of the current moment actually sit. A single hotel chain can turn its own concierge function into an AI-native capability because it already holds authority over the systems that the function depends on. A concierge platform trying to coordinate a traveler’s full journey—flights, ground transport, restaurants, local experiences, and lodging across brands—is trying to do something structurally different. It has to reconcile information and availability controlled by many independent parties, none of whom are obligated to grant it deep access or standing authority over their systems.

This is a real constraint, not a temporary one that better AI models will address. Airlines control their own inventory and rebooking systems. Independent restaurants control their own reservation platforms. Local tour operators control their own calendars. A platform can query availability from all of them. It cannot compel any of them to hand over write access, and it cannot force them to prioritize its requests over their own direct customers or other distribution partners. The AI can be arbitrarily sophisticated on the demand side and still run into a hard ceiling on the supply side, because sophistication does not confer authority.

What this means in practice is that AI concierge is scaling fastest and furthest where a single company already controls the full stack, such as single hotel brands, single airlines, single restaurant groups, and scaling much more slowly and unevenly where it has to coordinate across independently owned parties. The Hilton and Wyndham examples illustrate the first case. No comparably mature example of the second case yet exists: a platform that has actually won standing execution authority across a fragmented multi-supplier trip graph. That gap is exactly where ZEAL and platforms like it are aiming, and exactly why they are not there yet.

Why Access Still Expands

None of this means the democratizing effect isn’t happening. What used to be available only to wealthy users through dedicated human service is being offered more broadly, just not yet in the fully coordinated, cross-supplier form the most ambitious pitches describe. A guest booking through Hilton’s Planner or messaging a Wyndham property through ChatGPT is getting a version of high-touch, always-on assistance that used to require a hotel’s most senior staff or a paid concierge desk. That is a genuine expansion of access, even if it is bounded by brand.

The more accurate framing is that AI concierge is expanding fastest within single-controlled systems and expanding more slowly, and more unevenly, at the level of the full trip. Readers evaluating a platform’s concierge claims should ask a simple question: does this AI operate inside a system the company already owns, or is it trying to coordinate across systems owned by other people? The former is happening now, with real evidence behind it. The latter is still mostly ambition.

The Platform Advantage, Properly Scoped

For platforms, the real prize is not just automation. It is the accumulation of memory, context, workflow integration, and trust, but all of those advantages compound fastest inside a company’s own controlled systems, which is exactly where Hilton, Wyndham, and Accor have concentrated their investment.

The platforms that will win the next phase are the ones that can extend that advantage outward, negotiating real integration and execution authority with outside suppliers rather than simply layering a more capable chatbot over the same limited access they have always had. That is a business development and partnership problem as much as it is an AI problem, and it will not be solved by model improvements alone.

Conclusion

The shift underway is real, and the evidence for it is stronger than a general appeal to AI’s potential. Hilton, Wyndham, and Accor show that AI is changing concierge from a scarce, status-linked human service into a platform-native capability, at least within the systems those companies already control.

What the evidence does not yet show is a platform that has extended that same capability across a fragmented, multi-supplier trip graph the way ZEAL and similar platforms aspire to. That gap is not a failure of imagination. It reflects a structural limit: AI can make a company’s own information and workflows dramatically more accessible, but it cannot by itself grant a platform authority over information and systems that other companies control. Closing that gap will take supplier relationships and integration work, not just better models.

Concierge is being reinvented as a software-native layer of modern life. But it is being reinvented fastest where control was already concentrated, and more slowly everywhere else. That distinction should shape how much weight readers put on any platform’s claim to be the concierge of the future.

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I wrote this article in collaboration with Eric Sutfin, the founder of Zeal Remote and a Denver-based marketing strategist focused on sustainable hospitality, tourism, and remote-work communities.

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Footnotes

Most circular economy programs solve the operations problem before they solve the awareness problem. A brand builds buy-back logistics, sets up grading and refurbishment, launches a resale storefront, and then discovers that the hardest challenge is getting customers to know the program exists, trust the quality of pre-owned inventory, and take action. That is not an operations problem. It is a demand-generation problem, and it has its own category of platforms.

Content discovery and native advertising platforms sit inside publisher environments and distribute sponsored articles, video, and recommendations in formats designed to fit the surrounding editorial context.1 The category includes Taboola, Teads, Nativo, TripleLift, MGID, and others, and it functions as a distribution layer connecting advertisers seeking reach, publishers seeking monetization, and readers already browsing and exploring. For circular resale programs, that matters because recommerce, buy-back, refurbishment, and trade-in are still unfamiliar to large parts of the market. Discovery platforms can place educational and proof-based content in front of readers while they are already engaged, then move them from awareness to consideration and, ideally, to a specific conversion action.

This matters even more because many linear retail categories already treat discovery platforms as routine infrastructure. Fast fashion, dropshipping, and mainstream e-commerce brands often spend aggressively across these channels to manufacture demand for products that may be discarded within a season.2 The same mechanics that make a native ad effective at selling an impulse purchase can also be used to explain why a trade-in credit or certified refurbished device deserves a customer’s attention.

Circular resale has often treated discovery advertising as optional, or at least less central than it deserves to be, as though strong demand generation were somehow at odds with a sustainability position. That instinct is backwards. The circular economy does not need less distribution firepower than the linear economy. It needs the same infrastructure to secure leads and sales.

Closing that gap starts with understanding the platforms in the category well enough to use them correctly. A mistake would be to treat these companies as interchangeable. They differ meaningfully in reach, format, targeting logic, and the kind of trust they are best suited to build, and a circular brand should choose based on the specific demand problem it has, rather than on brand familiarity alone.

The pattern across the table is that platform choice should follow the specific job to be done. Programs chasing a measurable action, such as a completed trade-in or a submitted quote, are often better served by Taboola’s performance orientation or TripleLift’s programmatic reach. Programs fighting a credibility problem, such as convincing an enterprise buyer that refurbished electronics are secure, are often better served by Nativo’s editorial-style placements or Teads’ premium brand-safe inventory. Programs expanding into markets where the brand has little existing recognition may benefit from MGID’s international footprint and lower entry cost for testing.

Matching platform to program type

A useful way to think about this is to separate the demand problem into two broad categories: normalization and proof. Normalization is the challenge of making a circular offer feel legitimate, familiar, and worth considering. Proof is the challenge of demonstrating quality, security, economics, or environmental value in a way that lowers hesitation.

Lululemon’s Like New program is a useful illustration of the normalization problem. The program allows customers to trade in gently used items for store credit and resells approved pieces through a dedicated storefront, run in partnership with the resale technology provider Trove. The challenge there is less about explaining how trade-in works than about normalizing pre-owned activewear as a legitimate purchase. That argues for a platform built around editorial storytelling and premium adjacency, such as Nativo or Teads, over a pure performance widget optimized only for the fastest click.

Contrast that with an ITAD or device buy-back program targeting enterprise IT buyers. The barrier there is usually proof: certified data sanitization, chain-of-custody documentation, and measurable Scope 3 reduction. That content needs to reach a narrower, more skeptical audience and drive a specific lead-generation action, which is closer to what Taboola or TripleLift are built to optimize.

The general principle is simple: demand generation for circular resale is not one problem with one platform answer. It is at least two distinct problems, normalization and proof, and the discovery platform category has enough internal variation to address both if the brand chooses deliberately.

The incentive problem underneath the category

There is a structural caveat that applies to the entire category, not just to any one company. These businesses are built around engagement metrics, which means the system tends to reward headlines, images, and formats that are most likely to produce a click. That can create distortions and gives rise to the critisims around clickbate.3 In some cases, the content that performs best in the short term may be sensationalized, oversimplified, or less substantive than what would actually build durable trust.

That said, circular brands may have a useful advantage here. Readers have already been trained by linear retail to expect a certain kind of native content: promotional, disposable, and optimized for the next click rather than the next decision. A circular resale program that appears in the same inventory with substantive, credible content can stand out by contrast. The bar the category has set is not especially high. Circular brands that clear it decisively can often earn more trust per dollar of media spend than a linear competitor running the same playbook at greater scale.

For that reason, the incentive problem is not a reason to avoid the category. It is a reason to use it carefully. Brands that pair these platforms with real proof points, clear disclosures, and landing experiences that deliver on the promise made in the headline are not just avoiding the category’s worst habits. They are turning attention into credibility, which is especially valuable in circular commerce.

The takeaway

Circular economy programs do not scale on operations alone. They scale when the market understands what the program does and trusts it enough to participate. Discovery and native advertising platforms give circular brands a real way to build that understanding, but the platforms inside the category are not interchangeable.

Choosing among Taboola, Teads, Nativo, TripleLift, MGID and other platforms should depend on the specific job the program needs to do: normalization, proof, performance, or geographic expansion. Linear retail has already built fluency with these tools. Circular economy brands should do the same, not because they should imitate linear retail, but because the demand-generation infrastructure that sells disposable products at scale can also be used to sell durability, trust, and reuse.

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Footnotes

The mobile industry, especially smartphones, tablets, wearables, and other connected devices, is entering a familiar moment. Decades ago, the automotive industry faced a similar challenge: how to identify vehicles consistently across manufacturers, jurisdictions, and uses. The answer was the Vehicle Identification Number, or VIN, a standardized identity layer that made vehicles easier to register, insure, track, repair, recall, and trade.

That history offers a useful lesson for today’s mobility industry as it moves toward digital product passports. But the lesson is not simply to build “a VIN for the DPP era.” The VIN solved one problem: giving every vehicle a stable, unique identifier. The DPP has to solve a broader and more complex one: connecting identity to a live record of condition, ownership, and history that changes throughout an asset’s life.

The pre-standardization problem

Before standardized VINs, vehicle identification was messy. Manufacturers used different numbering systems, and in some cases, identification was tied to engines or other components rather than the vehicle as a whole.1 That made it difficult for states, insurers, law enforcement, and buyers to know whether they were looking at the same asset across different records.

The result was predictable. Registration was harder, theft was easier to conceal, recalls were more difficult to execute, and cross-border trade suffered from inconsistent documentation. In short, the market had vehicles, but it lacked a common language for identifying them.

This is the same basic problem now facing mobility products, batteries, components, and related assets. Without a shared identity system, each actor must create its own internal records, and those records rarely line up cleanly across the value chain.

How VINs became standard

VINs did not become useful because they were merely unique. They became useful because the industry converged on a format that could be recognized across stakeholders, and because that convergence was backed by regulatory mandate rather than left to voluntary adoption. The modern 17-character VIN format illustrated in Figure 1 became a federal requirement for model year 1981 vehicles and beyond.2

Just as important, the VIN did not become embedded overnight. It took years for the standard to spread and decades for it to become routine in registration systems, title processes, insurance files, recall workflows, and compliance practices. That long adoption curve matters because it shows that standards are not only technical choices. They are institutional changes.

The VIN also offers a structural lesson. It became powerful because it functioned as a federated system: a shared syntax, with manufacturers writing within assigned namespaces, rather than a single centralized owner controlling every record. That governance model is closer to the challenge mobility now faces than a fully centralized registry would be.

Lesson one: Trust depends on a shared identifier

The first lesson from VIN standardization is simple: trust becomes possible when everyone is referring to the same asset. A common identifier reduces ambiguity, makes records easier to reconcile, and gives buyers, sellers, regulators, and service providers a dependable anchor.

For mobility, this matters because product value is increasingly shaped by lifecycle information. A vehicle, battery, or component is not just a physical object. It is also a bundle of data about origin, use, maintenance, condition, safety status, and end-of-life history. A digital product passport can serve as the anchor that connects those data points across an asset’s life.

But identity is only the starting point. A static identifier can point to a record, but it cannot by itself explain how that record changes. That is where mobility begins to go beyond the VIN.

Lesson two: Standardization is a collective action problem

The automotive industry faced a classic coordination problem. In principle, every firm could benefit from standardization. In practice, each firm faced its own costs of transition, and many had an incentive to keep proprietary numbering systems that protected internal practices or existing workflows.

That is the classic collective action problem. The benefits of standardization were broadly shared, but the burdens of adoption were concentrated. No single company could capture the full value on its own, and no company wanted to move first unless others were likely to follow. It was a federal mandate, not voluntary convergence, that broke the stalemate.

Success required alignment across three dimensions.

• Governance: the industry needed agreed-upon rules, clear technical specifications, and mechanisms for maintenance and enforcement.

• Participation: enough firms and institutions had to adopt the standard for it to matter in practice.

• Incentives: companies needed to see business value, not just compliance cost, in making the change.

This is one of the most important lessons for mobility digital product passports. Regulation, through instruments like the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, is creating the forcing function that the market would not generate on its own. But regulation alone is not enough. Adoption still depends on industry governance, participation, and incentives reinforcing one another.

Lesson three: Trusted identifiers enable new value-added services

A trusted identifier does more than improve compliance. It creates the conditions for new services, especially in secondary markets where information asymmetry is high. Once VINs became reliable, the automotive ecosystem could build richer services around financing, insurance, product discovery, condition and inspection, ownership and title transfer, recalls, and compliance.3

That is where much of the value lies. In secondary markets, the buyer wants confidence, the seller wants liquidity, and intermediaries want trusted data. A VIN helps everyone speak the same language about the same vehicle, which reduces uncertainty and speeds up transactions.

This is precisely the function platforms perform in circular markets more broadly. Secondary markets for vehicles, batteries, and devices have historically faced resistance because trust gaps, price opacity, and fragmented supply make transactions costly to verify. A trusted identifier helps a platform substitute for that missing trust. The VIN’s real legacy was not the number itself, but the marketplaces, financing products, and inspection services that became possible once the number was reliable.

The opportunity beyond VIN

Digital product passports can do the same for mobility, and they can do more. Because they do not have to stop at identity, they can carry permissioned updates from repair networks, marketplaces, and recyclers. That makes it possible to support more precise financing decisions, better insurance underwriting, faster product discovery, standardized condition assessment, smoother ownership and title transfer, and automated recall and compliance checks that reflect an asset’s current state rather than only its state at the point of sale.

The VIN made the asset identifiable. A well-designed DPP system can make the asset legible across its life. That is a larger commercial opportunity, especially in secondary markets where current conditions and history drive value.

As noted above, the evolution of the modern VIN took a very long time. The current VIN system did not emerge quickly, and it took decades to become embedded in business processes and regulatory practice.4 That slow path was understandable in an analog era, when coordination was harder, the underlying identifier could only carry a fixed string of characters, and industry-wide adoption ultimately required government regulatory action to move to a common standard.

Mobility does not need to repeat that lenghthy timeline. The sector now has digital infrastructure that the automotive industry lacked when the VIN was designed. Machine-readable formats, distributed data systems, and regulatory frameworks are moving to require lifecycle data rather than only a point-in-time record.5

That means mobility can build something the VIN was never designed to be: not just an identifier, but an identity layer connected to a current, permissioned record of the asset it represents. That record can be written by different actors across the value chain under agreed governance rules, with each party contributing to the portion of the lifecycle it can verify.

That structure is itself a platform decision, not just a data decision. The key questions are who holds write authority, who bears the cost of participation, and who captures the value once the record exists.6 Get that governance right, and the passport becomes shared infrastructure. Get it wrong, and every actor builds its own version, leaving the industry with as many fragmented passports as it once had fragmented identifiers.

This is a strategic advantage, not just a compliance challenge. Format standardization is one decision. Governing who can write what, resolving conflicting entries, and preserving trust in a record that changes over time is a harder institutional task. But if mobility solves it, the industry will have built something more valuable than a static identifier: a living account of the asset.

What mobility can learn

The main lesson from VIN standardization is that identity infrastructure shapes market structure. Once the automotive industry agreed on a common identifier, it reduced friction across the entire lifecycle of a vehicle and enabled a host of downstream services.

Mobility now faces a similar transition, with a larger opportunity attached to it. As vehicles, batteries, and devices become more software-defined and circular-economy-dependent, the need for a reliable, shared, machine-readable identity becomes more urgent. But the need does not stop at identity. Digital product passports can fill the role the VIN filled, and, if the industry treats the coordination problem seriously, they can extend that role into a living record of condition, ownership, and history.

That means three things. First, the system must be interoperable across firms and jurisdictions, the way the VIN’s shared structure was. Second, it must support live lifecycle use cases, not just a static compliance record. Third, it must deliver enough value through secondary-market services to overcome the coordination problem that always accompanies standardization.

Conclusion

The VIN is ultimately a story about how markets evolve. What began as an internal manufacturer issue became a shared industry asset that made the automotive ecosystem more efficient, transparent, and scalable.

The mobile industry is now at a similar inflection point. Digital product passports can provide the identity layer that VINs provided, but they can also go further. If the sector gets the governance, participation, and incentives right, and builds the passport as a permissioned, multi-party record rather than a static identifier, it can create infrastructure that is trusted, current, and valuable across the asset’s life.

The opportunity is larger than compliance, and larger than simply replicating the VIN. It is the chance to connect identity with a living record, and to use that combination to unlock richer secondary markets for smartphones, tablets, and other connected devices.

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Footnotes

A recent paper by Krämer and Shekhar, which was showcased in the Platform Papers, provides a useful framework for understanding why digital product passports for mobile devices are likely to evolve into multi-sided data platforms rather than remain simple compliance records.1 Although this academic paper does not discuss digital product passports directly, its analysis of data sharing, data siloing, innovation, and welfare helps explain the strategic and regulatory choices that will shape the next generation of mobile-device circularity infrastructure. See:

Krämer, J., & Shekhar, S. (2025). Regulating digital platform ecosystems through data sharing and data siloing: Consequences for innovation and welfare. MIS Quarterly, 49(1), 123-154.

The paper’s central argument

Krämer and Shekhar study how regulation affects a dominant digital platform that operates in a primary market and then uses data from that market to compete in a secondary market. Their core finding is that both data sharing and data siloing reduce the incumbent’s incentive to innovate, but the welfare effects differ sharply: data sharing can improve competition and overall welfare, while data siloing is generally harmful because it shrinks the data pool and weakens innovation across markets.

Critically, the two policies are not independent dials — they interact. The amount of data available for mandated sharing depends directly on how much siloing takes place. The more data is walled off, the less there is left to share. This means a sharing mandate layered on top of a strict siloing regime accomplishes very little, because there is little left in the pool to redistribute. The authors’ policy implication is not simply “favor sharing over siloing,” but rather that policy works best when siloing is minimized and sharing is as broad as practical.

This distinction matters because the paper treats data as a nonrival input that creates demand-side economies of scope across markets. In practical terms, value is created when data generated in one context can improve outcomes in another, and value is lost when policy blocks that reuse too aggressively.

Four governance outcomes

The interaction between siloing and sharing is easiest to see laid out as a 2x2 matrix. Siloing runs on the vertical axis, which shows how much data is walled off by default before any sharing rule is applied. Sharing runs on the horizontal axis, which shows how much of what remains is actually made available across the ecosystem.

Reading the quadrants against mobile-device DPP governance outcomes:

Permissioned data platform (low siloing, high sharing). This is the paper’s optimal policy outcome, mapped onto device data. Activation, usage, repair, and grading data are captured broadly rather than walled off by default, and access to that pool runs through clear, auditable permissions rather than informal arrangements or closed defaults. This is the condition under which a DPP behaves like real infrastructure. It improves grading, pricing, and trust for every participant who touches the device, not just the actor who captured the data first.

Sparse data pool (low siloing, low sharing). Data isn’t locked away, but there is little incentive to contribute. Any actor that shares its slice — repair history, grading data, condition records — risks handing a free advantage to competitors who contribute nothing in return, so contribution stays low even though nothing is technically blocking it. In a DPP context, this looks like inconsistent schemas, informal data exchange between a few partnered firms, and no reliable way for a new entrant to know what’s available or how to request it. The pool exists, but it’s sparse, and it’s not usable at platform scale.

Data islands (high siloing, low sharing). The passport becomes exactly what critics fear: a compliance artifact rather than a value added platform. Each lifecycle actor — OEM, carrier, repair network, resale marketplace, or ITAD firm — holds its own closed record, and almost nothing crosses organizational lines. This is the default outcome if DPP architecture is built around proprietary data vaults from the start, and it doesn’t require any single actor to be the cause; it emerges whenever every party in the chain treats its own slice of data as proprietary.

Hollow mandate (high siloing, high sharing). This is the quadrant regulators should worry about most. A rule requires broad sharing, but because the underlying architecture was built siloed, there is very little left in the pool to actually share. This is the practical trap facing frameworks modeled on the EU’s Digital Markets Act: a sharing obligation imposed after the fact on a siloed system produces compliance paperwork, not a functioning data layer.

The matrix makes the paper’s key policy point concrete: sharing mandates and siloing rules aren’t substitutes for each other, and you can’t regulate your way out of a siloed architecture after the fact. The quadrant a DPP regime lands in is determined largely at the design stage, not the enforcement stage.

Why this matters for mobile-device DPPs

That logic maps well onto digital product passports for mobile devices. A mobile-device DPP can be more than a record of compliance or provenance; it can become a shared data layer connecting OEMs, carriers, repairers, refurbishers, recyclers, marketplaces, insurers, regulators, and consumers across the device lifecycle.2

Seen this way, DPPs have the potential to become multi-sided data platforms. Data generated upstream at manufacture, activation, usage, repair, grading, and recovery can improve decisions downstream in resale, refurbishment, warranty management, parts harvesting, and materials recovery. The passport becomes valuable not only because it stores information, but because it enables controlled data flows among actors who create and capture value in different stages of the circular economy.

It is worth using the paper’s market structure to make this concrete, though the mobile-device case has an added wrinkle that Krämer and Shekhar’s two-market model doesn’t fully capture. In the model, a data-rich platform incumbent holds a built-in advantage because it controls data generated in a primary market it already dominates, while a rival only closes the gap if sharing obligations are strong enough. In a mobile-device DPP context, the OEM typically holds that primary-market position. It accumulates manufacturing, activation, and early usage data by default, simply by being closest to the device at the start of its life. But a device’s lifecycle doesn’t stay inside the OEM’s view.

As the device moves through trade-in, repair, resale, and recovery, each subsequent party generates and controls its own slice of data that the OEM never sees: a repair network holds its own diagnostic and parts-replacement records, a resale marketplace holds its own grading and pricing history, an ITAD firm holds its own recovery and materials data. The OEM’s upstream advantage doesn’t shrink this problem, it compounds it. The ecosystem ends up with several siloed pools controlled by different actors at different lifecycle stages, none of whom can see the others’ data by default, rather than one incumbent and a set of data-poor rivals. That is what makes a shared, permissioned ledger structurally necessary rather than optional. No single party, including the OEM, actually holds the full picture on its own.

This is precisely why a shared, permissioned device ledger is strategically important — and why is a coordination problem, not just an access problem. The goal isn’t to redistribute data away from a single dominant holder; it’s to connect pools that are each individually incomplete. A ledger that only forces the OEM to share solves a fraction of the problem if repair networks, resale marketplaces, and ITAD firms keep their own slices walled off in turn. The Data islands quadrant doesn’t require one actor to be the villain — it emerges by default if every party in the lifecycle treats its own data as proprietary, which is the more likely failure mode than a single incumbent locking everyone else out.

From compliance tool to platform infrastructure

The paper is especially useful because it clarifies what separates a thin passport from a high-value platform. If DPP rules or system design force too much siloing, then the passport may fragment into data islands with limited utility for pricing, diagnostics, trust, and circular-market coordination.

If, by contrast, the system supports governed data sharing, the passport can improve quality verification, lower information asymmetries, and support more competitive secondary markets. That is the platform move: the passport shifts from being a static repository to becoming a transaction-enabling infrastructure layer for billions of dollars in trade-ins, resale, repair, refurbishment, and recovery activity tied to mobile devices.

Implications for DPP creation

For DPP creation, the paper suggests that architecture and governance matter as much as technical compliance. The important design question is not only what data goes into the passport, but who can contribute, who can access, under what permissions, and in what format data can move across the ecosystem.

A key implication is that DPP architecture should avoid building siloing in by default. Proprietary data vaults, closed condition-grading systems, and walled-garden trade-in programs all function as siloing mechanisms — regardless of which actor in the lifecycle builds them, whether OEM, repair network, resale marketplace, or ITAD firm — even when they are not labeled that way. Once the starting architecture is built around closed pools, later sharing requirements can help, but they cannot fully recreate the value of jointly captured data that never existed in the first place — which is exactly the hollow-mandate problem the matrix illustrates.

A workable mobile-device DPP will therefore need interoperable standards, role-based access, auditable permissions, and shared schemas that support circular use cases across firms. In strategic terms, the passport should be designed as an ecosystem layer that enables coordinated value creation rather than as a proprietary database optimized for one actor alone.

Implications for regulation

The paper’s strongest policy lesson is that regulators should be careful not to undermine value creation by overemphasizing siloing. In the authors’ model, strict siloing reduces the amount of usable data, weakens innovation in both the primary and secondary markets, and lowers overall welfare.

The EU’s Digital Markets Act is the paper’s own case study in this failure pattern: Article 5(2) imposes data siloing on gatekeepers by default, while Article 6(11)’s sharing mandate applies narrowly, to search engines only.3 That combination is directly relevant to how DPPs get regulated under frameworks like the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. If DPP rules default to siloed data architectures at any stage of the lifecycle and only mandate sharing in narrow circumstances, they risk reproducing the same welfare-reducing pattern. This lands squarely in the hollow-mandate quadrant, where the rule exists but the data pool underneath it doesn’t. The better approach is to favor controlled data sharing and interoperability over rigid restrictions that keep lifecycle data trapped within organizational boundaries.

Privacy, security, and competition safeguards still matter, but the objective should be to open access without shutting down the cross-market data flows that make circular systems smarter and more efficient. The paper also suggests that technical limits matter: full, real-time, granular sharing is often difficult, so practical governance mechanisms such as federated learning, data trusts, and privacy-preserving access controls may be necessary in addition to legal rules.4

Implications for platform strategy and DPP data infrastructure

For platform strategy, the paper reinforces the idea that the future battle over DPPs will not be only about compliance, but about ecosystem control, data access, and standards leadership. Firms that help define the rules of access, verification, interoperability, and trusted exchange may shape the economic center of gravity in circular mobile-device markets.

This creates a strategic tension. Every actor in the lifecycle has some version of the same incentive to resist broad sharing — OEMs, but also repair networks, resale marketplaces, and ITAD firms — because each one’s proprietary slice supports its own trade-in programs, service offerings, or downstream pricing power. Dominant firms have significant data at stake, and therefore often fear opening it up. But the broader industry gains more when the passport becomes a permissioned multi-sided platform that expands participation, supports innovation by data-deficient actors, and improves trust and transaction efficiency across the ecosystem.

Why the stakes are large

The mobile-device secondary market — trade-ins, resale, repairs, refurbishment, and end-of-life recovery — is already estimated at over $70 billion and growing rapidly. DPP infrastructure could reshape how those transactions are verified and priced. That is why the Krämer and Shekhar paper is useful beyond its immediate digital-platform context: it provides an economic explanation for why data governance choices will determine whether DPPs unlock market-wide value or merely add a new layer of administrative burden.

The practical takeaway is clear, and the matrix above is a reasonable test to apply to any DPP proposal on the table: does the architecture start from low siloing, and does the sharing rule apply to a pool that’s actually worth sharing? If digital product passports for mobile devices are built as open but permissioned data platforms, they can become an enabling infrastructure for competition, circularity, and higher-value transactions. If they are built around siloed compliance, they are far less likely to deliver the innovation and welfare gains that policymakers and industry participants are anticipating.

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Footnotes

1

Platform Papers

Regulating Data on Digital Platforms

Platform Papers is a blog about platform competition and Big Tech. Prominent academics discuss their latest research. The blog is linked to platformpapers.com, a repository that collects and organizes academic research on platform competition…

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2 months ago · Joost Rietveld

The companies racing to build the definitive product passport for smartphones are chasing something that cannot exist. Not because the technology isn’t ready, but because no single company has access to the full array of data on device lifecycles.

Across the secondary mobile device industry, multiple players are racing to define how device identity, ownership, condition, repair history, lock status, and resale eligibility should be recorded, verified, and shared. The implicit assumption behind most of these efforts is that one company — an OEM, a platform, an ITAD aggregator, or a standards body — can serve simultaneously as the infrastructure, the database, and the data provider for the full device lifecycle. That assumption is misplaced.

The better path is a single, permissioned device ledger built as shared market infrastructure, where relevant companies can contribute data as well as quiry the data on individual devices with confidence.

What Marketplaces Actually Need From Device Data

For a secondary marketplace, device data serves four distinct functions. It supports listing decisions: is this device eligible for sale, and at what grade? It enables trust signals for buyers: what is the lock status, the condition history, the ownership chain? It reduces fraud and chargebacks: has this device been reported stolen, is the IMEI (the unique identifier assigned to every mobile device) cloned, does the grade match the history? And it creates revenue opportunities: what verification products, history checks, and lock and unlock services can be built on top of it?

None of these functions are well served by a fragmented data environment. When device history is distributed across competing ledgers, each capturing a slice of the lifecycle and none producing a complete record, marketplaces are forced to reconcile multiple partial sources with different standards, different coverage, and different levels of authority. The result is higher operational costs, lower data quality, and a trust layer that is only as strong as its weakest contributing system. That is the prevailing situation today.

The value of device data does not come from having more of it. It comes from having the right data in one dependable place. A single trusted ledger reduces fraud, lowers chargebacks, improves buyer confidence, and turns each phone into a long-lived digital asset whose history can be queried across its full lifecycle by future buyers, insurers, refurbishers, and law enforcement alike. That creates both defensive value, in the form of loss prevention and dispute resolution, and offensive value, in the form of new revenue from paid verification and history products.

Multiple competing ledgers produce none of these benefits. They produce duplication, inconsistency, and a market where the burden of reconciliation falls on the platforms that can least afford it.

Why No Single Provider Can Build It Alone

Understanding why a single ledger is needed requires understanding why no single company can build one unilaterally. The reason is structural, and it is visible in an event taxonomy covering the full lifecycle of a smartphone.

Over their life, a smartphone will often pass through two or three owners and a half dozen companies.1 Mapped as potential events, a complete smartphone lifecycle record encompasses at least 62 distinct event types across 11 event classes. Across those classes, no fewer than 14 distinct actor types hold legitimate write authority (see Figure 1). The OEM, the party most often proposed as the natural system of record, controls only a few of these classes.

The data is not fragmented because the industry is disorganized. It is fragmented because each class of lifecycle events is generated by a different institutional actor with no obligation to route its data through anyone else’s system. Device identity is managed by the GSMA, the global body that manages mobile network standards and device identity registries.2 Identity and firmware events originate with the OEM at manufacture. Custody and shipping events are generated by carriers, third-party logistics firms, and ITAD firms (companies that manage IT asset disposal). Lock and activation events sit with network operators. Processing events — diagnostics, grading, erasure, repair — are created by the ITAD and refurbishment sector. Loss and recovery events involve law enforcement, insurers, and owner self-report. Commercial events are fragmented across marketplaces, carriers, retailers, and peer-to-peer platforms. Compliance and regulatory events sit with the bodies that certify devices for market and recall authorities. End-of-life events are handled by certified recyclers and dismantlers operating under environmental permits.

No single company holds all the data cards. Not Apple. Not Google. Not a carrier. Not an ITAD firm. Not the GSMA. A company that positions itself as the single system of record is not building infrastructure. It is claiming a data monopoly, but the multi-actor nature of the phone lifecycle makes that structurally unrealistic.

This is why the answer is not better proprietary databases. It is an open ledger with a shared identity layer, authorized writes mapped to institutional role, and interoperability standards for queries by authorized parties.

The Model That Already Works

The architecture the smartphone industry needs already exists in another durable goods market. No single company owns a vehicle’s history report.3 Dealers write sale events. Insurers write claim events. State DMVs write registration and title events. Body shops write repair events. The VIN is the anchor. The value of the record comes from the aggregation of authoritative contributions across independent actors.

The IMEI is the phone’s VIN. The question is whether the industry builds the equivalent infrastructure, or allows a dozen companies to each build an incomplete substitute, each capturing a slice of the lifecycle, none producing a record that any buyer, insurer, recycler, or regulator can fully trust.

In practice, a permissioned device ledger works as follows: the OEM writes manufacture and identity events. Carriers write activation and blocklist events. ITAD firms write processing events. Logistics providers write custody and shipping events. Insurers and law enforcement write loss and recovery events. Recyclers write end-of-life events. Each actor reads the full ledger but appends only what they are authorized to write. No single party owns the full story. Every participant in the secondary market relies on one trusted record.

For secondary marketplaces, this architecture is directly valuable. Listing decisions become faster and more reliable. Condition disputes are resolved against an authoritative history rather than seller self-report. Stolen device checks happen at the point of listing rather than after the transaction. And the ledger itself becomes a revenue-generating asset, a source of verification products, history reports, and lock and unlock services that improve conversion and reduce losses simultaneously.

The Coordination Problem

If the case for a single permissioned ledger is clear, why doesn’t one exist? The answer is a coordination challenge that the industry has not yet overcome.

Every marketplace would benefit if all platforms adopted the same ledger and the same data protocols. Trust data would be portable and universal. Fraud would fall across the board. Buyer confidence would rise for everyone. But any one marketplace that moves first risks imposing requirements on its own sellers while competitors continue to operate without them. A marketplace that requires IMEI verification at listing, accepts lock and unlock workflows, or contributes to a shared ledger bears the full implementation cost while non-participating competitors benefit from the spillover effects of a more trustworthy market without bearing any of those costs.

This is the prisoner’s dilemma of device data. In game theory, a prisoner’s dilemma describes a situation where two or more parties can each see that cooperation would produce the best collective outcome, but where acting cooperatively before others do looks like a competitive disadvantage.4 The rational short-term move for each party is to wait, even when all parties privately prefer the cooperative solution. Cooperation creates the best collective outcome for the secondary device market, but unilateral cooperation looks like a competitive disadvantage in the short term. Each platform may privately prefer a shared ledger, but each also fears being the one that imposes extra requirements first. The result is delay, fragmentation, and parallel systems that never fully interoperate, which end up being a suboptimal outcome for the entire industry.

The Collective Effort Required and the Role Marketplaces Can Play

Overcoming this prisoner’s dilemma requires changing the payoff structure, and no single actor can do it alone. Three mechanisms have broken analogous coordination failures in other markets, and all three are relevant here (see Figure 2).

The first is standards and regulation. The EU’s ESPR framework, which mandates Digital Product Passports for electronics sold in Europe, is the most likely near-term external catalyst. Compliance requirements reduce the risk of moving first by making shared data rules universal rather than voluntary. When regulators establish a floor, the coordination problem partially resolves itself, and every platform must meet the standard, so no single platform bears the competitive cost of doing so. Industry associations and standards bodies can accelerate this by developing interoperability frameworks that define how event data is structured, who is authorized to write each class, and how records are queried across systems.

The second is structured cooperation among marketplaces, facilitated by industry associations and standards bodies. Major secondary platforms agreeing on a common permissioned ledger and shared data protocols would distribute the burden of implementation across the industry rather than concentrating it on any one firm. This is not unprecedented. The Global Battery Alliance has already demonstrated that structured industry collaboration around digital product passports is achievable — building consensus among competing manufacturers, recyclers, and regulators around shared data standards for battery circularity.5 Secondary mobile device marketplaces are at an analogous moment. The platforms that compete on price, selection, and user experience can still cooperate on the data layer that makes the whole market more trustworthy, because a more trustworthy market benefits every participant.

The third mechanism is economic alignment, making participation in the shared ledger financially attractive rather than merely obligatory. Verification products, history reports, lock and unlock services, and condition certification programs bundled around a trusted ledger create revenue streams that offset the cost of contribution. When the ledger generates value that participants can monetize, the incentive to contribute shifts from compliance to commercial interest. Marketplaces are well positioned to lead this because they sit closest to the transaction where trust failures are most costly, and where trust signals command the highest premium.

The most practical answer combines all three. Build a permissioned, interoperable ledger that supports multi-party contributions while converging on one shared source of truth. Anchor it in emerging regulatory requirements so participation becomes expected rather than exceptional. Organize consortium agreements among major platforms so no single marketplace bears the cost of moving first. And structure the commercial model so that contributing to the ledger is also a way to generate revenue from it.

That architecture gives marketplaces a way to protect trust, reduce fraud, and monetize verification, without requiring that any one company own the entire lifecycle record. It gives the broader ecosystem, including OEMs, carriers, ITAD firms, insurers, recyclers, and regulators, a single authoritative record to write to and read from, rather than a proliferating set of competing private systems that never fully interoperate.

In the end, the industry benefits most when the data layer is built as market infrastructure rather than as a patchwork of competing private records. Secondary marketplaces are not the source of the fragmentation problem. They are, however, uniquely positioned to resolve it, because they are the point in the lifecycle where trust is most visible, most valued, and most consequential. The collective effort to build a single device ledger is not a concession to competitors. It is an investment in the market that makes all of their businesses possible.

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Sources

In early June 2026, Vinted Ventures made a move that deserves attention. The corporate investment arm of Europe’s largest secondhand marketplace joined a $26 million funding round for Tilt, a London-based live-auction app that uses AI to connect people who are selling products in real time.1 The round brought Tilt’s total funding beyond $50 million, with co-investors including TQ Ventures, Balderton Capital, Earlybird, and Seedcamp.

On its face, this looks like a routine corporate venture capital play. But it is clearly more. The Tilt investment signals that Vinted has made a strategic determination: live selling is not something to ignore or a feature to tack on to its current platform. It is the next frontier for recommerce, and Vinted intends make it part of its platform strategy. What is unfolding is a two-front strategic campaign, simultaneously defensive against encroaching live-commerce rivals and offensive toward category expansion into electronics. And there is a longer game embedded inside it: Vinted is almost certainly moving toward building live-selling capabilities of its own.

The Threat That Forced the Move

To understand Vinted’s strategy, it is important to understand what is bearing down on it. The live-selling platform Whatnot reached an $11.5 billion valuation last year, and the European live-commerce category has shifted from theoretical opportunity to active competitive battleground.2 Whatnot claims to hold close to 60% market share across North America and Europe, and its expansion into European markets directly threatens Vinted’s core user base in fashion and collectibles. In 2025, sellers on Whatnot drove $8 billion in live sales, more than doubling the year before, with sellers who go live three to four times per week averaging over $13,000 in monthly sales.3

That figure matters. Live selling is not just a new channel — it is creating a new class of power sellers who are building businesses around real-time video commerce.4 When those sellers choose Whatnot over Vinted, Vinted loses not just a transaction but an inventory supply chain. The most active live sellers are category anchors. Lose them and you lose the listings density that makes a marketplace work.

eBay presents a different but equally pressing challenge. eBay Live is now embedded directly in the eBay app, enabling sellers to host live product presentations and sell via short auction bursts during the stream. eBay has taken a focused position in car parts, pre-loved fashion, and collectibles. eBay Live launched in the UK on May 1, 2025, and a year in, seller results in the electronics category are striking. Matt Giles of Preloved Tech — described as one of the first sellers in the electronics category — reports selling as much in a 90-minute eBay Live show as he used to sell in an entire week in his eBay shop. He now goes live 10 times per week, meaning he sells 10x more through eBay Live in a week than he did through core listings.5

Pre-loved fashion is Vinted’s home turf, and eBay Live moving aggressively into that category is a direct territorial challenge. It is a move that eBay is pursuing with far more than a livestream feature. In 2024, eBay launched its inaugural Pre-Loved Fashion Week in partnership with the CFDA and the British Fashion Council, anchored by a live shoppable runway show called “Endless Runway” featuring pre-loved looks from major designers, all made immediately purchasable via eBay Live.6

In September 2025, Endless Runway expanded across all four global fashion capitals, with more than a dozen leading designers incorporating pre-loved pieces into their Spring/Summer 2026 collections, while eBay simultaneously staged its own shoppable runway shows streamed live via eBay Live. eBay also placed pre-loved fashion on the 2025 Met Gala red carpet, with various stars wearing pieces sourced from the platform.7 This is not a feature launch; it is a brand repositioning targeting the cultural and commercial ground Vinted has spent a decade building.

TikTok Shop presents another challenge, one rooted not in marketplace infrastructure but in audience capture. TikTok's platform reaches over 200 million users across Europe, and TikTok Shop's live-selling feature is embedded directly in that content feed, allowing it to reach consumers at the moment of discovery rather than the moment of intent.8 Its rapid transaction growth signals that a significant number of buyers are now willing to purchase secondhand and pre-loved goods through social video rather than dedicated marketplaces. For Vinted, whose growth has depended on being the default destination for secondhand fashion, a platform that intercepts buyers before they even think to search is a structural threat to the top of the funnel.

Vinted’s response to eBay’s competitive pressure has already been visible in fee dynamics: Vinted does not charge sellers listing or commission fees, monetizing instead through buyer protection fees and optional seller upgrades. Vinted does not charge sellers listing or commission fees, monetizing instead through buyer protection fees and optional seller upgrades. That model has put significant pressure on eBay in fashion and other C2C categories, helping drive eBay’s decision to drop selling fees for private sellers in the UK in 2024 and introduce a Buyer Protection Fee in 2025.9 Vinted has already moved one chess piece. The Tilt investment moves another.

The Defensive Logic: Protect the Apparel Core

Vinted’s primary business is European secondhand fashion, and it has built an extraordinary moat there. With over 100 million users globally, zero seller fees, and deep penetration across 20+ markets, it has made itself structurally difficult to displace in asynchronous C2C fashion resale. But live selling changes the game because it creates a parallel channel that plays by different rules.

In asynchronous marketplaces, the seller photographs an item, writes a description, sets a price, and waits. In live selling, the seller is a performer, a curator, and a trusted personality. The relationship between buyer and seller becomes a relationship between audience and creator. That is a fundamentally different dynamic, and it is one that Vinted’s existing platform architecture is not built to support.

Whatnot and TikTok Shop are building seller communities whose identity is inseparable from the live format. If those sellers capture Vinted’s fashion audience, the migration risk is not just transactional; it is relational. Buyers follow sellers they trust, and in live commerce, that trust is built through repeated broadcast relationships. By backing Tilt, Vinted is ensuring that a platform aligned with re-commerce values and operating on Vinted-compatible rails has the capital and strategic support to compete. Vinted Ventures is the first industry investor from the re-commerce world to back Tilt, and the partnership stems from a deep industry synergy: while Vinted has structured and democratized the global secondhand market asynchronously, Tilt aims to achieve a similar transformation in real time through video.

The defensive intent is visible in the geography of Tilt’s operations. The platform is live across the UK, Italy, Spain, and Poland — four of Vinted’s most important European markets — and claims to be the only major live commerce platform operating at scale across those countries. Vinted is not backing a pre-revenue startup. It is backing a platform already competing for its users, which it can now help shape rather than fight.

The Offensive Logic: Electronics and Category Expansion

The defensive framing, while accurate, understates the ambition. The more interesting strategic bet is offensive: using live selling as the primary vehicle for Vinted’s expansion into other categories, especially used and refurbished electronics.

In August 2024, Vinted launched its electronics category, enabling sales of speakers, headphones, fitness trackers, laptops, audio devices, wearables, game consoles, and e-readers. CEO Adam Jay has stated the company is moving into categories such as phones and cameras, with an aspiration to become the kind of everything-store platform that Amazon represents. By April 2026, Vinted had completed a secondary share transaction valuing the company at €8 billion, and the platform now supports multiple categories including homeware, kidswear, electronics, books, and collectibles alongside its core clothing business.

Electronics, however, present a trust problem that static listings handle poorly. A used smartphone photographed against a white background tells a buyer almost nothing about battery health, screen integrity, functional condition, or network compatibility. These are the trust gaps that drive buyers toward certified refurbishers — and the margins those certifiers extract as a result.

Live selling solves the trust problem structurally. Livestreams allow sellers to show product condition in real time, demonstrating actual device functionality, screen quality, and physical condition in ways that asynchronous listings cannot replicate. For high-value electronics where counterfeiting is a concern, live demonstration substitutes for institutional certification. A seller who powers on a device, runs the screen through its paces, and answers live questions from bidders is providing a form of trust infrastructure that static photographs and text descriptions simply cannot match.

The European refurbished electronics market was valued at $32.4 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $73.4 billion by 2033, expanding at a CAGR of 10.8% over that period.10 This is the market Vinted wants to enter at scale, and live selling could become a valuable channel for doing so. The fee structure that Vinted has already established, charging buyers rather than sellers, means it can attract inventory-rich sellers with low switching costs, precisely the model that Tilt is also deploying.

The Creator Economy Meets the Circular Economy

What is happening here reflects a broader structural convergence that I have been tracking across my recent writing: the meeting of the creator economy and the circular economy.11 These two macro trends have been developing largely in parallel, but the infrastructure of live commerce is forcing them into direct synthesis.

The creator economy is built on the proposition that individuals with audiences and authenticity can generate commerce directly, without brand intermediation. The circular economy is built on the proposition that goods retain value through multiple lifecycles and that extending those lifecycles is economically and environmentally superior to single-use consumption. Live selling of secondhand goods is the product of these two logics running into each other.

Tilt’s CEO Abhi Thanendran articulated this convergence: “The next generation won’t browse static listings the way their parents did — they’ll discover and buy through video, conversation, and live interaction, across every category.”12 What that generation is also doing — whether they frame it this way or not — is creating economic livelihoods from the circulation of secondhand goods. The live seller moving pre-loved fashion on Tilt is simultaneously a creator, a circular economy actor, and a micro-entrepreneur. Vinted’s investment in Tilt is, among other things, a bet on the digital infrastructure required to support these changes.

Why Vinted Will Build Its Own Platform

The Tilt investment is best understood not as an endpoint but as a learning position. Vinted is acquiring knowledge, not just making an equity play. By backing Tilt, Vinted is running a real-world observation of how live commerce works in its core markets and with its core categories. Tilt's CEO Abhi Thanendran described the partnership as a relationship where "we'll be drawing on Vinted's operational expertise and learnings as we scale," while Vinted Corporate Development Principal Martijn van Heeswijk stated: "Through Vinted Ventures, we back founders building the next generation of re-commerce. Tilt is creating a genuinely differentiated experience in live selling, a format we believe has strong potential in fashion and beyond".13

Tilt’s AI tooling is particularly instructive. Its Snap tool automates listing creation when a seller holds an item up to the camera, generating product descriptions and suggested pricing in real time.14 Thanendran has noted that live commerce places significant operational demands on sellers, and AI is the mechanism for reducing those friction points. This is precisely the kind of infrastructure insight that would be expensive to develop from scratch but straightforward to integrate by a platform company. Vinted can watch what works, understand where sellers struggle, and build a native live layer inside its own platform that benefits from those learnings.

The strategy has played out before. Amazon watched third-party sellers build businesses on its marketplace before internalizing the most successful product categories. Facebook watched live video grow on YouTube before building Facebook Live. Platform companies with the scale and resources to build tend to invest first and build second — the investment serves as the research and development phase.

Vinted has the scale to make the build decision: over 100 million users, €813 million in revenue with 36% year-over-year growth, and profitability with a €76.7 million net profit representing 330% growth.15 A company with that scale, resources and a clearly articulated ambition to make secondhand work does not permanently outsource the core commerce interface to a portfolio company. The Tilt investment can jumpstart Vinted’s ability to eventually bring live selling in-house.

Live-selling offers a new way to engage. Where static listings reach buyers who are already searching, live selling reaches buyers who are browsing, discovering, and deciding in real time. Where asynchronous marketplaces build trust through ratings and return policies, live commerce builds trust through transparency and human connection. And where traditional network effects accumulate slowly through listing density, live selling compresses that dynamic into a single broadcast: one seller, one audience, one moment of shared attention that turns circular goods into objects worth owning and stories worth telling.

The Stakes and What They Mean

Several market research reports project the live commerce market will grow at a CAGR of 20% to 40% through 2033, with regional expansion moving from its Asia Pacific base into North America and Europe.16 The platforms that establish dominance in the next three to four years will be difficult to displace. Vinted's investment signals that it understands this dynamic. Its Tilt investment is not a hedge. It is a sign that the company intends make live re-commerce a key strategic pillar rather than be a bystander watching Whatnot, eBay and others carve up the European opportunity.

The secondhand market did not become mainstream because people suddenly grew more concerned about the environmental impact of their purchases. It became mainstream because platforms like Vinted systematically removed the friction, trust deficits, and network gaps that had kept secondary markets fragmented and inaccessible. Zero seller fees lowered the barrier to entry. Buyer protections converted skeptics into repeat customers. A critical mass of users created the liquidity that made every additional listing more valuable than the last. Now live selling is emerging as a rapidly growing channel through which circular platforms can extend that logic even further.

Vinted's bet on Tilt, and its evident intent to build its own live layer, is a recognition that live selling is not a feature to add to a circular platform. It is a channel that redefines what a circular platform can be. Vinted has already demonstrated that it knows how to build platform businesses that change the eCommerce landscape. The secondhand market in Europe looks the way it does largely because of what Vinted built. If live re-commerce follows a similar trajectory, the company that controls the live infrastructure will shape the circular economy for the next generation of consumers. Vinted intends to be that company.

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Sources

11

Show and Sell Insights

The Creator Economy and Circular Economy Are Converging: Refurbished Electronics Are Next

Two dynamic areas of the economy evolving in parallel are beginning to converge. The creator economy has moved well beyond content and audience-building into commerce, with creators increasingly influencing discovery, trust, and transactions across major platforms. At the same time, the circular economy is moving beyond a policy and sustainability frame…

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2 months ago · Peter C. Evans

Title: Closing the Circularity Delta in Electronics

Type: Keynote

Event: MIT Platform Strategy Summit

Location: MIT, Cambridge, MA

In this video at the MIT Platform Strategy Summit, Peter Evans delivers a keynote on applying circular economy principles to electronics—boosting sustainability, extracting value, and meeting regulatory demands.

Core concept: The Circularity Delta

The gap between what a company spends on electronics annually vs. the net value recovered at retirement. Example: $1M spend, $100K recovered = 90% delta (only 10–15% value recovery through informal disposal).

Solution: Purpose-built circular platforms can push recovery to 30%+, cutting the delta in half and transforming ITAD into a value-generating operation.

Three-stage approach:

1. Pilot: Assess current recovery, identify improvements

2. Integrate: Align stakeholders, scale systems, embed circular platforms

3. Optimize: Use data to extend circularity to procurement, customer programs, sustainability—making it core to strategy

Why digital circular platforms matter:

• Transparency, compliance, secure data handling

• Multi-channel resale (B2B, B2C, C2C)

• Greater scale and geographic reach

The Circularity Delta concept was developed by Peter C. Evans and Guennael “G” Delorme in their white paper, Scaling the Circular Economy for Electronics: Why Every Business Needs a Platform Strategy.

Type: Panel

Event: ASD MarketWeek

Location: Las Vegas Convention Center, NV

In this video, Peter Evans moderates a live panel on recommerce—retail’s fastest-growing sector. Joining him: Jacques Stambouli, Matt Leavell, and Dennis Hoang. The conversation covers liquidation, resale, reverse logistics, and secondary markets.

Key topics:

• Growth drivers: Shifting consumer behavior, value shopping, off-price retail, and resale marketplace expansion

• New channels: eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Whatnot, TikTok Shop lowering barriers for entrepreneurs and businesses

• Sourcing & relationships: Long-term partnerships over transactions, diversification across suppliers, categories, and channels

• Technology: AI, automation, inventory systems—focused on solving real bottlenecks, not tech for tech’s sake

• Future outlook: Live selling’s rise, industry consolidation, professionalization, and massive underserved opportunities

Actionable lessons from leaders who’ve successfully scaled in recommerce—for entrepreneurs, resellers, liquidators, retailers, and reverse logistics professionals.

Moderator: Peter Evans

Panel Members:

Jacques Stambouli, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Via Trading Corp.

Matt Leavell, Founder & CEO, Buy Low Warehouse (also CEO of WHSL Market)

Dennis Hoang, Co-Founder & COO, Patturn

Title: Fashion Returns, Recommerce & AI-Powered Resale

Type: Interview with Patturn Founders

Location: All Things Circular Podcast, Dallas, TX

In this episode of All Things Circular, host Peter Evans sits down with the founders of Patturn, to explore how technology is transforming fashion returns. Patturn built a recommerce operating system for apparel, footwear, and accessories that helps brands process, grade, and resell returned inventory at scale—from inspection to pricing and multi-channel resale.

The conversation tackles modern e-commerce returns: most items come back near-new due to sizing or preference, not damage. Instead of liquidation or landfill, Patturn maximizes value through recommerce on eBay, Poshmark, and Depop.

A key theme is “single-SKU logistics.” Returned fashion items are one-of-one in size, condition, and style. Patturn’s system serializes inventory and distributes it across marketplaces in real time to maximize sell-through and pricing.

The episode also explores AI in recommerce—automated pricing, listing optimization, and future AI shopping agents that could source secondhand for consumers. As resale grows, intelligently matching supply with demand across fragmented marketplaces is a critical advantage.

Dennis and Davis also debunk the myth that buying return pallets is an easy path to profit. Extracting value from returned goods requires infrastructure, technology, and expertise.

Whether you’re a retailer improving return recovery, a reseller navigating secondary markets, or simply curious about the future of circular fashion, this episode offers practical insights.

Host: Peter Evans

Guests: Patturn Co-founders, Dennis Hoang and Davis Hoang

Global supply chains face resource scarcity, trade tensions, and environmental concerns. Platforms can improve resilience and sustainability across sectors including electronics where they optimize e-waste management, while also supporting efficient reaggregation of materials like EV batteries, industrial magnets, and rare earth metals.

Digital platforms advance ‘digital mining’ by connecting buyers and sellers in secondary markets, improving traceability and efficiency. Industry experts will provide actionable insights into how digital platforms can transform waste into new critical material streams. The future of resource security lies not in extracting more but in innovating smarter ways to reclaim what we already have.

Moderator: Peter C. Evans (Summit Co-Chair)

Panelists:

Technologies Jack Jia – Circular Cloud Sourcing and Operations, Microsoft

Sean Miles – CEO and Co-Founder, Recycle Global Exchange (RGX)

Katie Schindall – Vice President of Decarbonization, Strategy, Schneider Electric

Maire Callanan – Vice President of Commercialization, Alta Resource

Type: Keynote presentation

Event: 2023 Luohan Academy Digital Economy Conference

Location: Hangzhou, China

The Luohan Academy was established by Alibaba Group on June 26, 2018, in Hangzhou, China. It was initiated by former Alibaba chairman Jack Ma as an open research institute and global think tank focused on the socioeconomic impacts of digital technologyo this end. In 2023 Annual Digital Economy Conference at the West Lake State Guesthouse in Hangzhou, China from June 20 to 21, 2023. The conference brought together the world’s leading social scientists, digital economy practitioners, and policy makers for the interdisciplinary investigation of theory and practice, to generate new consensus and insights on the world’s most pressing issues.

Peter Evans presented on “Spurring Circular Economies through Digital Platforms”. His presentation and subsequent panel discussions focused on how digital infrastructure and data sharing can drive sustainability and facilitate circular exchange.

• Core Topic: How digital platforms and data-driven ecosystems can help companies transition from linear “take-make-dispose” models to circular economies that emphasize reuse, recycling, and remanufacturing.

• Collaboration Focus: Emphasized the importance of trustworthy data spaces to support demand-side mitigation.

• Network effects to circular scaling

Evans explained that positive network effects create a flywheel: as more users join, material/product availability increases, attracting even more participants. This scalability is crucial to reversing the circularity gap.

His presentation illustrated how platforms power the circular economy not just by making linear commerce more efficient, but by enabling regenerative, closed-loop business models through lower transaction costs, better discovery/matching, and network effects.

Type: Expert Panel

Event: MIT Platform Strategy Summit, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Location: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

Video Link:

Digital platforms have largely fueled the linear economy (“take-make-dispose”). This panel explores how platforms can power the circular economy—a regenerative model that keeps resources in use, minimizes waste through recycling/refurbishment/reuse, and creates closed-loop systems.

Key discussion points:

• Case studies and best practices across industries

• Transformative potential of circular platform business models

• Key challenges: technology, monetization, policy, stakeholder engagement

• Opportunities for scaling platform-based circular models

The result is an enlightening perspective on the challenges and opportunities that arise when developing platform-based circular models, including issues around technology, monetization, policy and stakeholder engagement

Moderator: Peter C. Evans – (Summit Co-chair)

Panel

Kenny Arnold – Senior Manager, Service Design, Ellen MacArthur Foundation

Maryam Al Mansoori – General Manager, Rebound Plastic Exchange

Deborah Weinswig – CEO and Founder, Coresight Research

This white paper looks at how oil and gas companies can use platform strategies, reverse logistics, and circular operating models to get more value from surplus, used, and end-of-field-life assets. It shows that being circular is not just good for the environment, but also makes financial and operational sense for a sector with a lot of infrastructure, complex logistics, and risks related to critical materials.

The paper explains why companies should treat circular asset disposition as a key business capability, not just a way to get rid of things. It highlights how platforms can bring together buyers, sellers, refurbishers, and recyclers from different areas and asset classes to improve recovery, compliance, and efficiency.

Key Takeaways

• Oil and gas companies spend a lot on infrastructure and equipment, but often do not make the most of surplus and end-of-life assets, treating them as a low-priority problem instead of a chance to recover value.

• The paper explains how the Circularity Delta, a practical way to measure the difference between what is spent on assets and what is recovered, can help organizations measure and track the value they are losing.

• Circular logistics in oil and gas follows three steps: recovering assets, using them in a circular way, and generating value.

• The sector faces unique challenges, including remote locations, hazardous materials, gaps in documentation, data security concerns, customs issues, and complex ownership structures.

• These challenges make a multi-platform strategy necessary, as no single platform can cover all types of assets, conditions, and regions effectively.

• Platforms can support the resale, redeployment, refurbishment, repair, and responsible recycling of machinery, materials, and electronics.

• Technologies like AI, predictive analytics, digital product passports, APIs, and automated auction platforms are making circular operations more scalable and transparent.

• Regulatory pressure is increasing with ESG reporting, requirements for producer responsibility, expectations for digital traceability, and national priorities for material security.

• The paper recommends a phased approach: pilot, integrate, consolidate, so companies can build their capabilities, align their teams, and create a lasting operational advantage.

Who Should Read This

• Leaders of IOC and NOC companies.

• Teams responsible for asset management and decommissioning.

• Executives in charge of supply chains, procurement, and operations.

• Leaders in sustainability, ESG, and compliance.

• Strategists and operators of platforms and marketplaces.

For inquiries, advisory support, or speaking opportunities, please contact Peter C. Evans directly.

Subscribe to Platform Professional for ongoing insights into circular economy platforms, ITAD, and enterprise resource strategy.

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Download the full white paper below.

Scaling O&g Circular Economy

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This white paper examines how digital platforms are transforming electronic asset disposition by replacing traditional, fixed-vendor RFP models with more dynamic, transparent, and competitive market mechanisms. It shows how platform-based approaches can improve value recovery, reduce administrative friction, strengthen compliance, and lower the environmental impact of end-of-life electronics management.

Every year, businesses generate large volumes of obsolete or unwanted electronic equipment, yet many still rely on slow, rigid, and fragmented disposal processes. This paper explains why platform-based models are emerging as a more efficient way to match specific material streams with specialized recyclers, refurbishers, and ITAD providers.

We examine how circular platforms support reverse logistics, improve material matching, address the long-tail problem in e-waste, and create a more scalable and accountable system for managing electronic asset disposition.

Key Takeaways

• Traditional electronic asset disposition often relies on long-term RFP contracts with a limited number of vendors, which can create pricing rigidity, limited geographic coverage, and fragmented documentation.

• Circular platforms replace this model with a more dynamic marketplace approach, allowing businesses to post specific jobs and receive competitive bids from a broader network of qualified recyclers and ITAD providers.

• These platforms improve value recovery and cost efficiency by matching material streams with specialized, often local, service providers, reducing transportation costs, carbon emissions, and administrative overhead.

• Circular platforms offer more than simple transaction matching. They provide tracking, compliance documentation, certificates of destruction, logistics coordination, and greater transparency across the disposition process.

• The paper highlights the importance of addressing the long-tail problem in e-waste management, where many uncommon materials, remote locations, and infrequent jobs are poorly served by traditional contracting models.

• Platforms are especially effective in solving this long-tail challenge because they can connect diverse waste streams with specialized recyclers through dynamic matching and broader service networks.

• The RGX example shows how a neutral digital marketplace can help enterprises test platform-based disposition through pilot programs that demonstrate pricing, geographic reach, compliance support, and operational efficiency.

• The broader implication is that platform-based e-waste management is not just a process improvement. It represents a strategic shift toward a more circular, data-driven, and environmentally responsible model for managing electronic assets.

Who Should Read This

• Enterprise asset management and disposition leaders.

• ITAD professionals and reverse logistics managers.

• Sustainability executives and circular economy practitioners.

• Platform strategists and marketplace designers.

For inquiries, advisory support, or speaking opportunities, please contact Peter C. Evans directly.

Subscribe to Platform Professional for ongoing insights on circular economy platforms, ITAD, and enterprise resource strategy.

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How Platforms Are Transforming Electronic Asset Disposition (2)

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This white paper looks at how companies can get more value from old electronics by using a platform strategy, reverse logistics, and circular operating models. It explains why getting rid of old IT assets should be seen as a way to recover value, not just a disposal process.

Every quarter, companies retire a large number of laptops, servers, and other IT equipment that still have economic value. However, these assets are often treated as a problem to be disposed of, rather than an opportunity to make money.

We look at the circular economy for electronics by focusing on reverse logistics, platform matching, and operational design. This shows how businesses can recover more value from old electronics while reducing their environmental impact, improving compliance, and making their operations more resilient.

Key Takeaways

• Companies retire millions of electronic assets every quarter, but often see getting rid of them as a cost, not a chance to recover value. Laptops, servers, and other IT assets still have value at the end of their life.

• The circular economy for electronics is not just about recycling, but also about extending the life of assets through reuse, repair, refurbishment, redeployment, resale, and recycling when necessary.

• This paper introduces the Circularity Delta, a measure that shows the gap between what companies spend on hardware each year and the value they recover, making it clear where value is being lost.

• Circular platforms are key to making the circular economy for electronics work. They connect buyers and sellers, support secure transactions, enable grading and logistics, and make resale and recovery more efficient.

• The paper identifies different platform models, including build-own-operate, white label, outsourced resale, managed service, and mission-driven approaches, showing that one size does not fit all.

• To get good results, companies should roll out circular economy plans in phases: Pilot, Integrate, Optimize. This means starting with a small pilot, scaling up across teams and asset classes, and using data to make circularity a part of procurement and operations.

• As regulations become stricter, being able to track assets, dispose of them securely, and measure recovery performance are becoming essential, not just nice to have.

Who Should Read This

• IT asset disposal professionals and reverse logistics managers.

• Platform designers and marketplace strategists.

• Sustainability executives and circular economy practitioners.

• Enterprise asset management teams.

• Supply chain resilience leaders.

For inquiries, advisory support, or speaking opportunities, please contact Peter C. Evans directly.

Subscribe to Platform Professional for ongoing insights on circular economy platforms, IT asset disposal, and enterprise resource strategy.

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Download the full white paper below.

Scaling Electronics Circular Economy Final

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Live selling has already changed the way people shop online by making it a real-time, interactive experience. What started as a way to sell collectibles, beauty products, clothes, and jewelry is now moving into new areas. One of the most consequential is used and refurbished smartphones.

This shift matters because the market for used phones is already large, global, and growing fast. Recent estimates place the refurbished and used mobile phone market at around $73 billion in 2025, with forecasts climbing to over $130 billion by 2030.1 If live-selling platforms can capture even a modest share of that flow, they could establish a meaningful new commerce channel at the intersection of sustainability, mobile upgrades, and social shopping. Some resellers, such as Newegg and Quick Ship have started to leverage this channel.2

But the opportunity is harder than it looks. Platforms that treat used phones like any other live-selling category are likely to burn credibility rather than build it. The ones that win will do something different: they will build the specific trust infrastructure that used phones require.

Why Phones Are Attractive

Used phones have three traits that make them appealing to live-selling platforms: scale, repeatability, and velocity. Smartphones are one of the most in-demand categories in consumer electronics. When people upgrade their phones, it creates a constant flow of devices back into the secondary market, and buyers often respond quickly when they believe they are seeing a well-priced unit in scarce supply.

The category also benefits from meaningful macroeconomic tailwinds. As new flagship phones get more expensive, more consumers are turning to used and refurbished options.3 Concerns about sustainability and affordability have made second-hand devices appealing to more than just bargain hunters. Live selling is not trying to create a new market for used phones. It is trying to capture part of an already substantial and expanding resale flow.

For live-selling platforms thinking beyond phones, there is an additional layer of opportunity. Phones are not just consumer products; they are gateways into broader questions of recommerce, trust infrastructure, reverse logistics, and data-enabled verification. A live-selling platform that learns how to sell used phones well is simultaneously learning how to support other high-value, condition-sensitive categories over time. Getting phones right is a proof of concept with compounding value.

Who Is Competing?

The competitive field is taking shape, but no platform has yet fully claimed used phones as its defining live-selling category. Each of the leading contenders brings meaningful strengths and meaningful gaps (see Table 1).

Whatnot has built a strong identity around community-led live auctions and flash sales. Its audience is engaged and accustomed to real-time bidding energy, and its electronics presence has grown. But Whatnot’s model was built for collectibles and categories where the excitement of the show often is the product experience. Used phones require a different kind of trust, and Whatnot has not yet demonstrated the structured seller controls or verification infrastructure that high-value electronics demand.

eBay Live may have the most natural structural advantage of any platform. eBay already has deep buyer intent for used electronics, an established trust layer, and direct experience with consumer smartphone resale. Its live format gives it a chance to combine its strategic focus on the circular economy with the engagement of livestream commerce.4 The risk is execution: eBay has historically been slow to develop live commerce, and the window for differentiation is not unlimited.

TikTok Shop brings a different strength — discovery at a massive scale. TikTok can generate attention faster than almost any commerce channel, and for sellers with a compelling on-camera presence, conversion can follow quickly. But TikTok’s challenge with high-value, condition-sensitive categories is the opposite of eBay’s: attention is abundant, but structured trust infrastructure is thin. A platform optimized for $30 impulse purchases faces real hurdles when the transaction is a $400 used iPhone.

Amazon Live is Amazon's live-streaming platform where brands and influencers show products in real time to shoppers who are ready to buy on Amazon. These streams appear on product detail pages and in the Amazon app, with clickable product carousels that link directly to checkout. This makes Amazon Live similar to digital QVC, rather than the auction-style live selling on Whatnot or eBay Live. The platform works best for brands and sellers who use Amazon's fulfillment services, have consistent inventory, and advertise on the site. It's not as suitable for independent resellers who sell one-off items. For high-value items like used iPhones, Amazon Live is set up for new or "like-new" products from established sellers, rather than items that need careful grading and individual sales, which is more common on secondary-market platforms.

This means that no single platform is guaranteed to win. Instead, the competition is open, and the key to success lies in differentiating oneself within the category.

Why Smartphones are Different

Unlike beauty products or streetwear, smartphones are a complex technology that requires precise technical verification before purchase. In addition, they don't work on their own. A phone needs to connect to a network and have a data plan to function. Since they are expensive items, often costing between $300 and $800 even for used devices, they are a prime target for fraud. Their high value, small size, and ease of transport make them easy for criminals to sell on the black market or ship to other countries for a quick profit.5

A buyer considering a used iPhone or Samsung device typically wants precise answers about model, storage, battery health, cosmetic condition, carrier lock status, activation lock status, repair history, included accessories, warranty terms, and return rights — before completing a purchase.

These factors create a very different operating challenge. In categories like beauty products or streetwear, the show itself often drives conversion: entertainment, rarity, social proof, and the fear of missing out do the work. With used phones, the show can help, but it cannot do all the work alone. The device must also be verifiable, service-eligible, and accurately described in ways that survive post-sale inspection.

Consider what can go wrong in a phone transaction that would never arise with items typically sold on live-selling platforms. The device could be carrier-locked to a network the buyer does not use. It could be blacklisted due to an unpaid carrier balance. It could have an undisclosed repair history that affects resale value or water resistance. It could still be logged into a previous owner’s Apple ID, rendering it a very expensive paperweight.

There is also the problem of network band compatibility.6 A phone manufactured for one regional market may lack the radio bands required by a buyer’s carrier — even if it is fully unlocked and passes every verification check. A consumer who buys an Asian-market variant of a flagship device may find it connects to LTE but drops to 2G in their city, or misses 5G bands entirely. This is not a defect; it is a hardware specification mismatch that no IMEI check will catch, and that most buyers have no way to identify without guidance.

None of these problems — carrier lock, blacklisting, undisclosed damage, or band incompatibility — are visible on camera. All of them destroy buyer trust when they emerge after the sale. And they do not all surface at the same moment. A blacklisted phone fails on activation. A carrier-locked phone fails on the first SIM swap. A band-incompatible phone may appear to work initially — calls connect, basic data loads — and only reveal its limitations later when the buyer notices poor indoor coverage, missing 5G, or dropped calls in areas their previous phone handled fine. That delayed failure pattern is harder to adjudicate in a dispute and easier for a bad-faith seller to deny.

This is the trust problem at the heart of live phone selling — and it is not solved by better video production or a more enthusiastic host.

What Live Selling Does Well

Despite those challenges, phones are not incompatible with live selling. In fact, live video can solve some problems that static listings handle poorly.

A seller can show the exact device, rotate it to show cosmetic condition, demonstrate the screen, camera, ports, and boot-up sequence, and answer questions in real time battery indicators and network compatibility. That matters because trust in used devices is often built through evidence, not description. A polished listing can claim a device is in excellent condition; a livestream can let buyers see the evidence and interrogate it on the spot.

For premium inventory, such as curated drops, flagship iPhones, thoroughly tested Androids, that combination of live demonstration and purchase urgency could lift conversion meaningfully above what static resale channels deliver. In this sense, live selling is most likely to succeed as a complementary channel rather than a replacement for existing resale infrastructure. Search-led marketplaces, trade-in programs, and traditional recommerce sites will continue to dominate standardized flows. These are well-established channels. But livestreams could create a viable venue for higher-margin moments, faster inventory turns on premium units, and audience-driven resale events that create genuine excitement around exceptional inventory.

The format has real potential. The question is whether platforms will build the infrastructure to support it properly.

What Platforms Must Do to Win

If live-selling platforms want used phones to become a real category rather than perpetual pilots, generic livestream tooling is not enough. Winning requires building category-specific trust infrastructure across five distinct areas.

1. Structured Data Requirements

Platforms must require sellers to disclose standardized fields for every listed device: model, storage capacity, battery health percentage, carrier lock status, supported frequency bands and regional market variant, cosmetic grade, repair history, included accessories, warranty terms, and return policy. Without that structure, live selling remains too dependent on improvisation and improvisation is a poor foundation for a high-value electronics category where disputes are common and returns are expensive.

The inclusion of frequency band and regional variant data is not a minor detail. It is the only way buyers can verify network compatibility before purchasing. A platform that mandates this disclosure closes a gap that no verification database currently covers.

This is a necessity, not an option. A platform that establishes clear, mandatory disclosure standards will be materially harder to defraud on and materially easier to trust than one that allows sellers to describe inventory however they choose.

2. Verification Infrastructure

The single most important step platforms can take is to connect their commerce systems to existing telecom-grade verification systems.

Every used phone has a unique IMEI number that can be checked against the GSMA Device Check database and carrier block lists to determine whether a device is clean, service-eligible, and not reported stolen or blacklisted.7 These verification systems already exist. They are used by carriers, insurers, and professional recommerce companies. Live-selling platforms need to integrate them into the transaction flow.

The design logic here matters. Rather than asking buyers to trust individual sellers, platforms should shift part of the trust burden to system-level validation. A buyer who sees that a device has passed an IMEI check against the GSMA block list has meaningful evidence — not a seller’s assurance — that the device is not stolen and can be activated on a carrier network.8 Layering in device-history services that flag repair records or prior damage reports adds another verification layer that static listings typically cannot provide.

It is equally important to be clear about what IMEI verification does not cover: network band compatibility. Whether a device supports the specific frequency bands used by a buyer’s carrier is a hardware question, not a registry question. It requires separate disclosure at the point of listing, which is why the structured data requirement above is not optional.

Platforms that treat verification as an afterthought will find that used phones generate an unsustainable volume of post-sale disputes. Platforms that build verification into the transaction moment will find that buyer confidence converts — and that the verified-device layer becomes a competitive differentiator, not just a cost.

3. Workflow Design for High-Value Transactions

High-value electronics require stronger controls than most live-selling categories. Platforms need seller verification processes that screen out bad actors before they can run live sessions, dispute-resolution rules designed specifically for condition-sensitive electronics, and clear buyer protections with visible return rights, payment escrow, and audit trails that document what was shown and claimed during the livestream.

Shipping standards matter too. Platforms need to specify packaging requirements, carrier requirements, and insurance thresholds that reflect the value of the goods and the realistic rate of transit damage. None of this is glamorous, but all of it determines whether the category builds durable repeat trust or generates a steady accumulation of avoidable disputes.

4. Seller Acquisition Strategy

The supply side of this market is as important as the viewer experience. Used phones will not become a real category unless platforms attract the resellers and refurbishers that control meaningful volumes of well-tested, properly graded inventory.

The most attractive supply-side partners are certified refurbishers, trade-in and buyback businesses, phone wholesalers with curated inventory, and specialty mobile resellers focused on premium devices. These operators already have the discipline that live phone selling requires: testing protocols, cosmetic grading systems, fulfillment infrastructure, and the ability to answer condition-specific questions in real time.

Not every reseller is a good fit. Pure commodity sellers that compete only on price, or operators with inconsistent grading and weak customer service, are less likely to benefit from a live format that exposes every weakness in process and presentation.

The strategic implication is clear: platforms need a deliberate reseller acquisition strategy, not just a viewer growth strategy. The platforms that best understand the structure of the resale supply chain — who has premium inventory, who has the operational discipline to perform on camera, who has the reputation to sustain buyer confidence —will have the strongest foundation for making used phones a real, live-selling category.

5. Education for Both Sides of the Transaction

The final requirement is education, and it runs in both directions.

Sellers need training on how to present phones properly on camera, specifically how to demonstrate boot-up, navigate to battery health screens, show port condition, test cameras, and display cosmetic flaws honestly. A seller who cannot confidently show a phone’s battery health percentage on camera is not ready to sell premium phones in a live environment.

Buyers need clear guidance on what terms like refurbished, used, tested, certified, and as-is actually mean in the context of a livestream purchase. These terms carry very different implications for device condition, warranty coverage, and return rights. Buyers also need to understand network compatibility — specifically, that an unlocked phone is not the same as a compatible phone, and that regional variants can affect band support in ways that are not obvious at the point of sale.9

Platforms that invest in seller preparation and buyer literacy will have fewer disputes, higher repeat purchase rates, and a category reputation that attracts better supply over time.

What Could Go Wrong

If the verification and disclosure infrastructure is not in place before the category scales, early buyers will encounter problems that static listings handle better: devices that turn out to be locked, batteries that are worse than claimed, phones that connect but perform poorly due to band incompatibility, and condition disputes that platforms cannot adjudicate fairly. Word travels fast in commerce communities. A category that develops a reputation for post-sale headaches will lose buyers faster than it can acquire new ones, regardless of how good the live experience feels in the moment.

There is also a seller-quality trap. If platforms move too quickly on onboarding sellers without screening for operational discipline, they risk populating the category with the wrong supply. This includes operators with inconsistent inventory and poor customer service who perform poorly on camera and generate disproportionate disputes. Live shopping platforms have navigated versions of this problem; phones will present a sharper version of it.

The cautionary lesson from other live-selling categories is that format novelty buys attention but not loyalty. Attention is the easy part. Building a sophisticated trust layer in a category where the purchase decision carries real financial risk is where the actual work is.

Category Growth Strategy

The most realistic path to making used phones a durable live-selling category is not onboarding as many sellers as possible at the outset. It is systematically testing the specific elements that determine whether live commerce actually works for this product class.

Before scaling aggressively, platforms should validate five things. First, they need to identify which trust signals actually reduce buyer hesitation. Second, they must determine which reseller types succeed in a live environment. Third, platforms should test whether live selling genuinely improves sell-through, average selling price, or margin relative to existing resale channels. Fourth, they need to figure out how to surface the verification layer to buyers at the point of transaction, including the limits of IMEI checks around band compatibility. Fifth, platforms must define what the full post-sale workflow needs to look like to avoid disputes.

Platforms that address those issues before scaling will build a better playbook for growth. Those that skip the strategy and move straight to seller onboarding will find that phones expose every weakness in their trust infrastructure faster than any other category they have tried.

Conclusion

Live commerce has worked well in categories that share a common profile: easy to show, easy to evaluate quickly, and easy to buy on impulse. Used phones are different in every one of those dimensions.

A buyer who pays $400 or more for a phone that turns out to be band-incompatible with their carrier has not just had a frustrating shopping experience — they have bought a device that looks fine on camera, passed every available check, and still fails to meet their basic needs. The platform that enabled that transaction bears real reputational responsibility for it.

That is not a reason to avoid the category. It is a reason to approach it seriously. Platforms that build real trust infrastructure for used phones, including structured disclosure, telecom grade verification, compatible band transparency, and educated sellers, will not just win a share of a market headed toward $130 billion. They will have demonstrated that live commerce can handle consequential transactions responsibly. That is a foundation worth building.

Exclusive masterclass at Mobile Disrupt 2026 in Miami. On July 6th, Rich Bulger and I will do dive deep into the live selling of smartphones. We will explore why this category is strategically unique, the trust infrastructure platforms must build, and what it takes to make used phones a real category rather than a perpetual pilot.

For more information see:

Mobile Disrupt Masterclass: https://mobiledisrupt.com/master-class-essentials-from-circular-logistics-to-business-innovation/

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Footnotes