Facilitating circular change with services

1Until recently, most businesses were looking at the concept of sustainability as a matter of high-level global policy discussion related mainly to environmental risks and fairly disconnected from their everyday activity. Adapting businesses to sustainability was more often than not perceived as a cost and/or obstacle to increasing the profitability (e.g., environmental regulation related to CO₂ emissions). Few companies have seen sustainability as an opportunity to improve performance and strengthen their competitiveness. Nevertheless, the awareness is rising that global growth rooted in “make-take-dispose” production patterns, driven by short term profit maximization, is disconnected from the planet’s physical constraints and is becoming utterly unsustainable.

2Linear production practices are at the root of enhanced depletion of natural resources, creating enormous amount of waste and aggravating the environmental and climate risks. Against this backdrop, the rethinking of the