It lets you clarify priorities, align teams, and measure progress. By structuring your approach, you secure your supply, reduce environmental impacts, and create value.
What you should remember:
- A circular economy roadmap is a strategic tool, not a simple action plan.
- Diagnosing your flows and vulnerabilities is the basis for deciding where to act.
- A clear, quantified ambition avoids vagueness and guides your priorities.
- Levers for action lie in products, business models, and key partnerships alike.
- Without a monitoring strategy, you risk falling into greenwashing, for example. Good monitoring ensures credibility, resilience, and competitiveness.
Why is a roadmap essential to a successful circular strategy?
Adopting a circular economy approach isn't just about launching a few recycling or waste-reduction initiatives for the environment. To be credible and effective, you need to rely on a clear course, shared and steered over time. That's exactly the role of a roadmap.
From awareness to structured action
In many organizations, circularity starts with pilot projects such as eliminating single-use plastics, launching an eco-designed product line, or setting up selective sorting. These actions are necessary, but they remain fragmented if they aren't connected by a shared strategy. The roadmap lets you connect these initiatives, fit them into a global vision, and move from the experimental stage to a systemic transformation.
When these projects stay isolated, they carry several risks. They consume internal resources without generating company-wide benefits, they create confusion between teams, and above all they give an impression of "greenwashing" if the real impacts aren't measured or amplified. In the long run, you risk losing the trust of your customers, partners, and even employees. This approach thus helps avoid siloed thinking and dispersion, and ensures strategic coherence.
Creating lasting value while reducing risk
A circular economy roadmap isn't just about organizing internal actions. It also reveals strategic opportunities. Cost reduction through better resource management, the development of new offerings from reuse or repair, and a stronger brand image among customers are all levers that generate economic and environmental value.
At the same time, this approach helps you anticipate and reduce risks linked to dependence on raw materials, energy fluctuations, or regulatory constraints (ESPR, DPP, the AGEC law, etc.). It thus becomes a resilience tool, capable of securing the company's activity in a context of growing uncertainty.
What are the 5 key steps to building a roadmap?
1. Conduct a circularity diagnosis: flows, impacts, and vulnerabilities
The first step is to draw up a precise map of the company's material, energy, and waste flows. This snapshot is essential, as it lets you identify where losses occur, which resources are the most critical, and which recovery channels remain untapped. Without this work, the company acts blindly, sometimes investing in peripheral actions and missing the real circularity levers. It's also exposed to hidden vulnerabilities: dependence on a single supplier, extra costs linked to an imported material, or a sudden rise in energy prices.
In a 2025 context marked by market volatility, regulatory pressure, and geopolitical risks, ignoring these points of fragility can quickly translate into a loss of competitiveness.
Measuring environmental impacts is the other pillar of this diagnosis. This isn't yet about carrying out complex analyses, but about quantifying broad orders of magnitude: CO2 emissions, volumes of waste sent to landfill, water or energy consumption. This data lets you rank priorities and avoid the trap of symbolic but marginal actions. It's also essential for setting credible objectives and showing stakeholders that commitments are based on tangible facts rather than mere intentions.
Finally, identifying vulnerabilities offers a forward-looking view: what risks could weaken the business in the years ahead? This step prepares the company to anticipate rather than endure. The examples of Toyota and Airbus in the automotive and aerospace industries speak for themselves. Indeed, these companies suffered production and revenue losses linked to poor visibility over their supply of critical components.
A well-conducted circularity diagnosis would have helped detect these dependencies and put contingency plans in place. For any company, this work isn't a luxury, but an insurance policy, since it secures the continuity of operations, builds stakeholder trust, and forms the basis for a credible, robust roadmap.
2. Define a clear ambition, aligned with the company's strategy
Once the diagnosis is done, the company must turn its findings into a clear, mobilizing ambition. Defining an ambition isn't about piling up slogans. It's about setting a precise direction that fits into the overall strategy. Too often, circular initiatives fail because they remain confined to side projects, disconnected from the company's vision. In 2025, with rising regulatory obligations (DPP, ESPR) and growing investor pressure on ESG criteria, it's becoming essential to link circularity and business strategy.
This ambition must be inspiring enough to bring teams on board, but also concrete enough to guide decisions. A company might, for example, commit to halving the share of its non-recovered waste within five years, or to reaching 100% reusable packaging by 2030. Such objectives provide a clear vision, express a strong will, and help prioritize actions.
Setting a clear ambition also means accepting the need to mark out the path: defining intermediate steps and short- and medium-term targets, with achievable goals that quickly demonstrate tangible results. This gradual approach is essential to maintain momentum and avoid running out of steam. A solid roadmap must therefore combine a long-term vision, quantified objectives, and realistic milestones.
3. Identify the levers for action: product, business model, partners
After defining an ambition, the next step is to choose the right levers to implement it. Eco-design lets you reduce impact right from the design phase, favoring repairability or the use of recycled materials. But the circular economy goes further: it also invites you to explore new business models and strengthen cooperation.
Decathlon's example is illuminating. In Belgium, the retailer launched the We Play Circular offering, which proposed renting sports equipment rather than buying it. Even though the experiment wasn't made permanent, it showed that a player could move from a sales-centered model to a usage-based one. This kind of initiative opens the door to rental, second-hand, or refurbishment services, which extend product lifespans and reduce waste.
Finally, involving your partners (suppliers, local authorities, employees, companies working in the same industry, etc.) is essential to turn waste into resources and secure your supply chain. It's in this combination of product innovation, business model, and cooperation that the circular economy roadmap finds its full strength.
4. Structure a short-, medium-, and long-term action plan
A roadmap shouldn't remain a statement of intent. It must translate into a concrete action plan. To be effective, you need to distinguish three horizons. In the short term, prioritize quick, visible actions that show teams and stakeholders that the initiative is underway. In the medium term, engage in more structuring projects, such as redesigning a product line or adapting logistics. Finally, in the long term, embed the transformation of the business model within a lasting vision. Every action must be clearly prioritized, resourced, and assigned to an owner. This structuring is what prevents dispersion and builds a credible dynamic of change.
5. Set up monitoring, evaluate, and adjust
A roadmap only has value if it lives over time. Without regular monitoring, objectives remain theoretical and efforts run out of steam. Defining simple indicators, such as the share of recycled materials, the volume of waste avoided, or the reduction in CO2 emissions, lets you measure progress and adjust course based on results. It's also an essential way to remain accountable to stakeholders and keep their trust.
Failing to follow through on commitments can be costly. In 2023, ASOS, Boohoo, and George at Asda were required by the UK government and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to clarify their environmental claims on their "eco" or "responsible" product lines. Their lack of transparency in tracking objectives led to accusations of greenwashing and a loss of credibility with consumers. Conversely, a company that regularly evaluates and adjusts its roadmap can demonstrate its progress, correct its mistakes, and strengthen its resilience.
Tools & methods to structure and steer your approach
For a roadmap to be credible and operational, you need tools that bring clarity, foster cooperation, and let you measure results. The tools we've developed meet this goal by integrating systems thinking and accounting for today's challenges, flows, impacts, and the interdependencies between actors.
Value Chain Canvas: analyzing the risks and opportunities of a value chain
The Value Chain Canvas gives you an overall view of material, energy, and information flows. It highlights areas of vulnerability (dependence on a material, regulatory exposure, resource waste) but also value-creation levers. It's an essential starting point for prioritizing actions in the roadmap.
Partner Map: exploring interdependencies and strengthening cooperation
The Partner Map helps you visually represent the company's ecosystem. This tool lets you identify key stakeholders, their roles, and possible cooperations. By working with this tool, you can spot synergies, build local collaborations, and involve partners in the success of your circular strategy.
Circular Canvas: rethinking the business model through a circular lens
The Circular Canvas is the go-to tool for transforming your economic model. It helps you integrate circularity principles directly into your offering, by designing durable products, setting up rental, reuse, or repair services, and adapting your business model in line with planetary boundaries.
Which stakeholders are involved in building the roadmap?
The success of a circular economy roadmap doesn't depend solely on the tools used, but above all on the people involved. The more collective the approach, the more coherent, legitimate, and lasting it will be.
Cross-functional internal governance
Setting up a circular roadmap requires the involvement of every department. CSR can't carry this transformation alone. Leadership sets the direction, procurement rethinks supplier selection criteria, production optimizes processes, marketing turns the ambition into concrete offerings, and HR sets up circular economy training to build skills on the topic. It's this cross-functionality that ensures alignment and prevents the initiative from staying confined to a single department.
Partners and suppliers
A large share of the impacts and opportunities lie outside the company, in the supply chains. Involving your suppliers is therefore essential to work on eco-design, secure access to sustainable materials, or co-develop reuse solutions. The circular economy then becomes a shared project, where everyone contributes to reducing vulnerabilities and creating common value.
Customers, local authorities, and territorial actors
The roadmap gains legitimacy when it involves customers and territorial actors. Consumers can be made aware of or involved through repair or second-hand offerings. Local authorities, in turn, play a key role in waste management, sorting infrastructure, or the emergence of new industries. Their involvement helps anchor the circular strategy within a broader dynamic of ecological and territorial transition.
In short
A roadmap isn't a theoretical exercise. It's a strategic steering tool. It lets you know where to focus your efforts, prioritize your actions, and demonstrate your results. Without it, you risk dispersion, unintentional greenwashing, and a loss of competitiveness against better-structured competitors. With it, you have a clear framework to anticipate regulatory constraints, secure your supply chains, and demonstrate, figures in hand, the economic and environmental benefits of your choices. It's this rigor that turns circularity into a lasting competitive advantage.