Cars from Cars, Buildings from Buildings, Shoes from Shoes

The circular economy has entered its next stage: sectoral systems, shared infrastructure and materials kept in circulation 

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

Cars from cars. Buildings from buildings. Shoes from shoes. Electronics from electronics. Energy infrastructure from energy infrastructure. 

This is, of course, not a new definition of circularity. Cradle to Cradle has long been built on the principle that materials should circulate safely and continuously through biological and technical cycles. What felt significant in Berlin was where the conversation is now concentrating: on the business models, sector partnerships, infrastructure and information flows that allow those cycles to function at meaningful scale. 

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

Michael Schmidt-Salomon, Jan Ceyssens, Smail Al Hilali and Yadir Salazar-Mejía approached circularity from different angles, but together their contributions pushed it into a larger economic and geopolitical conversation: how societies respond to resource pressure, how value chains are structured, how regions secure materials, and how policy begins to redefine resilience. 

Design the next product into this one 

Michael Braungart brought the idea into sharp focus through the automotive sector. After years in which the mobility debate has been dominated by how vehicles are powered, his Congress contribution returned attention to the physical substance of the car itself: what materials go into it, how they are combined and why those materials are still not routinely becoming the next generation of vehicles. 

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

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

The formulation travelled easily across sectors. In the regional transformation discussion, architect Robert Marlow translated it into buildings from buildings. Fashion made the same logic visible on the Congress runway. Signe Marie Bakka Backhaus of roccamore presented the brand’s C2C Certified® high heels during the C2C Fashion Show, bringing material choices, traceability and design into a tangible product context. The Show brought C2C Certified® products into a deliberately visible setting,, while the following textile discussion moved the conversation from individual products to the conditions required across the sector: standards, regulation, traceability and the structures needed to keep materials circulating. 

If the ambition is ultimately shoes from shoes, choosing a better material is only one part of the equation. Traceability, collection, sorting, material compatibility and routes back into production all have to connect. 

What is this product intended to become next, and have we designed a credible route for it to get there? 

(Sessions included: “Car to Car: A Way Out for the German Mobility Industry”, “Regional Transformation Through Cradle to Cradle”, “C2C Fashion Show & Talk” and the textile panel on standards and regulation.) 

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

Electronics exposes the limits of solving circularity company by company particularly clearly. Complex products combine valuable and often scarce materials, fast innovation cycles, intricate supply chains and highly variable routes for repair, refurbishment and recovery. 

The Cradle to Cradle Electronics Initiative reflects that reality by bringing actors across the value chain into a shared sectoral effort. The unit of transformation is no longer only the individual device, but the network of actors that determines whether that device, and the materials inside it, can remain economically useful. 

Repartly offered a tangible example through repair.Technical repairability is only latent potential. For repair to become normal, diagnostics, spare parts, logistics, service capacity and viable economics all have to line up.. 

Digitalisation and automation can remove friction between those elements, but the wider lesson is more important: 

Ahrend’s circular business model offered another illustration: value can extend across several cycles of use rather than ending with the first sale. 

(Sessions included: “The Cradle to Cradle Electronics Initiative”, “Resource Crisis Meets High Tech: Scaling C2C Electronics”, “The Robotic Evolution of Refurbishment” and “The Evolution of Ahrend’s Circular Business Model”.) 

Sector collaboration is becoming part of the infrastructure 

The print and paper session provided one of the clearest examples of how certification can evolve from an individual company journey into a platform for sector collaboration. 

Janni Toft Nielsen of KLS PurePrint and Markus Vögeli of Vögeli shared their companies’ Cradle to Cradle Certified® experience alongside Print the Change, the cooperative they have created to advance circular print together. 

The detailed chemistry, paper, ink and production questions deserve their own discussion. The broader significance is that circular transformation is pushing companies towards private open-innovation models: spaces where knowledge, infrastructure and solutions can be developed collaboratively, even among actors that still compete in the market. 

That is an important maturation of the circular economy. Competitive advantage may increasingly depend not only on what a company can optimise internally, but on the quality of the shared systems it helps build around itself. 

(Session: “From Ink to Toilet Paper: C2C in Printing, Packaging, and Hygiene”.) 

Circularity needs somewhere to happen 

Cities and regions rarely manufacture products themselves, but they can determine whether circular models have room to develop. 

Frank Wolters of Berlin TXL Management described urban development as a space for experimentation, including the use of excavated soil to produce construction materials locally. 

The insight is almost disarmingly practical: before sourcing a new material, look at what is already under your feet. 

Planning, procurement, infrastructure and access to experimental space can either accelerate circular models or keep them marginal. Place, in that sense, becomes part of circular design. 

(Session: “Regional Transformation Through Cradle to Cradle”.) 

The next mine may already be in use 

The electronics discussions surfaced a contradiction that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: Europe remains dependent on imported raw materials while enormous stocks of valuable resources are already embedded in products, buildings and infrastructure within its own economy. 

Circularity changes the question from where do we source the next tonne? to why are we allowing the tonne we already own to disappear from productive use? Recovering and retaining high-value materials can reduce exposure to volatile supply chains, preserve economic value, support industrial capability and strengthen resource sovereignty. 

Circularity, viewed through this lens, becomes a strategy for protecting the material basis on which industry depends. 

(Sessions included: “Resource Crisis Meets High Tech: Scaling C2C Electronics” and “International Cooperations and Resource Sovereignty”.) 

Data is beginning to remove one of circularity’s oldest barriers: invisibility 

Third-party verified data is beginning to change how circular products are found and selected. 

C2C Certified® products, supported by third-party verification and structured evidence, are increasingly easier for algorithms and AI-assisted procurement systems to recognise and surface. 

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

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

Transparency, in other words, becomes infrastructure. 

(Sessions: “C2C Certified for the Algorithm” and “When Design Meets Data”.) 

From isolated excellence to sectoral capacity 

Taken together, these examples point to a more mature stage of the circular transition. 

The ambition itself remains strikingly accessible: 

Cars from cars. 

Buildings from buildings. 

Shoes from shoes. 

Electronics from electronics. 

What is changing is the machinery being assembled around that ambition. 

Sector initiatives are bringing actors that previously worked separately around the same material challenge. Repair and refurbishment are bbecoming scalable operating models. Companies are creating shared platforms and cooperatives. Regions are experimenting with new material flows. Digital infrastructure is beginning to turn transparency into market visibility and decision-making power. Circularity is entering conversations about procurement, resource security, industrial competitiveness and infrastructure investment. 

Anna Alex’s keynote, After the Hype: The Decade Where Sustainability Gets Real sharpened the commercial dimension circularity will increasingly be judged by whether it can generate margin, attract capital and create market value.. 

For companies, this considerably broadens the field of action. Circularity can no longer sit comfortably inside one sustainability function or product-development team. It increasingly reaches procurement, logistics, service, finance, data architecture, partnerships and long-term strategy. 

Standards such as Cradle to Cradle Certified® have an important role precisely because they provide a common framework across that complexity: measurable requirements for material health, product circularity, clean air and climate protection, water and soil stewardship, and social fairness, supported by verified product information that can increasingly travel beyond the certificate itself. 

And ambition and delivery are still separated by a substantial distance. 

Industry is far from routinely producing cars from cars, buildings from buildings or shoes from shoes. Meanwhile, an economic environment marked by cost pressure, geopolitical uncertainty and competing short-term priorities is hardly accelerating the transition at the pace many once envisaged. 

Across the Congress, circularity was increasingly discussed less as a proposition whose necessity still needs to be defended and more as a transformation whose supporting structures now need to mature quickly enough to deliver impact commensurate with the scale of the resource, climate and economic challenges they are meant to address. 

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