Circularity: The Next Revenue Engine for Tech

Devices are becoming asset pools, and circularity is the key capturing their value

28 May 2026

device hardware materials

Associate Director, Green Design Lead

UK

Something quiet is changing in the way technology companies think about the hardware they make and sell.

Devices are beginning to be understood for what they have always physically been: concentrations of finite, recoverable, and increasingly contested materials. They are not simply products to be sold and forgotten, but instead long-term material assets that happen to run software.

That shift matters because the economics around critical materials are changing:

  • Supply chains are becoming more fragile
  • Geopolitical concentration of materials and technology is increasing
  • The growth of AI infrastructure is accelerating demand for the metals that underpin modern computing

In this environment, recovering materials from devices already in circulation is as much a resilience strategy as it is a sustainability initiative. In fact, the companies responding to this shift earliest are not treating circularity as an adjacent ESG programme, but rather as part of supply-chain design, asset management, and long-term operational resilience.

The strategic material value of devices

A modern smartphone contains gold, cobalt, lithium, copper, and rare earth elements. A decommissioned server rack often contains higher concentrations of some valuable metals than the ores from which they were originally extracted. Yet for most of the tech industry’s history, what happened to these materials at end of life has been operationally peripheral.

The scale of this loss is significant. Globally, only around 22% of e-waste formally enters documented recycling streams, despite the material value embedded within it. The remainder, containing an estimated US$62 billion worth of recoverable natural resources annually, is landfilled, informally processed, or otherwise lost from documented recovery systems.

At the same time, the supply of many critical materials remains heavily concentrated geographically. China continues to dominate the refining and processing of several inputs central to digital infrastructure and battery technologies, including rare earth elements, graphite, lithium, and cobalt. For technology manufacturers and infrastructure operators, that concentration creates growing exposure to price volatility, export controls, and supply disruption.

Recovered materials are unlikely to replace primary extraction in the near term – particularly given accelerating demand from AI infrastructure and electrification – but they are increasingly becoming a strategic buffer against supply concentration and procurement risk.

That changes the commercial logic around circularity. The question is no longer simply whether materials can be recovered responsibly, but whether companies can afford to keep losing access to materials they have already paid to procure once before.

Capturing value through supply chain strategy and recovery capabilities

One of the clearest signals that this shift is already underway comes from Apple.

Its recent environmental reporting is notable not simply because recycled content is increasing, but because of where those recycled materials are now being used. Apple reports that all Apple-designed batteries now use 100% recycled cobalt, all magnets use 100% recycled rare earth elements, and all printed circuit boards use 100% recycled gold plating and tin soldering.

Those materials are not interchangeable commodities. They sit directly within the categories most exposed to geopolitical concentration and future supply pressure.

Apple has also invested heavily in recovery and disassembly capabilities, including robotics systems designed to improve material recovery from returned devices. Taken together, those investments suggest a company thinking not only about emissions and reporting metrics, but also about long-term access to strategic inputs.

Ten years ago, recycled content played a negligible role in mainstream consumer electronics manufacturing. Today, leading manufacturers are building increasingly sophisticated closed-loop recovery capability into their supply chains.

This does not mean circular material flows are economically or technically solved at scale – recovery yields, processing economics, and secondary material quality still vary significantly across materials and device categories – but the direction of travel is increasingly clear. Material recovery is becoming strategically relevant to technology manufacturing in a way it was not previously.

Why ownership models are becoming strategically important

As the material value embedded within devices becomes more commercially relevant, ownership structures start to matter differently, too.

The Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) market has grown rapidly over recent years, driven primarily by demand for predictable revenue models, lifecycle management, and reduced upfront capital expenditure for enterprise customers. But DaaS also changes something more fundamental: it allows manufacturers and platform providers to retain control of physical assets across multiple lifecycle stages.

That distinction matters because retaining ownership creates the conditions for refurbishment, component harvesting, and eventual material recovery. Devices that remain within managed recovery systems are materially more recoverable than devices dispersed permanently through outright sale models.

Ownership alone, however, is not enough. Commercial advantage still depends on reverse logistics, refurbishment capability, recovery yield, and the ability to reintegrate recovered materials back into production systems. But companies that retain control of device fleets are structurally better positioned to capture that value than those that do not.

The same logic applies even more strongly within cloud and AI infrastructure.

Unlike consumer electronics, data-centre hardware is deployed, upgraded, and decommissioned in highly controlled environments. As AI adoption accelerates investment in compute infrastructure – particularly GPU-intensive infrastructure with shorter upgrade cycles – the concentration of recoverable material within hyperscale environments increases significantly.

Cloud computing does not reduce material responsibility, but rather concentrates it operationally. The organisations managing that infrastructure increasingly control not just computing capacity, but large-scale flows of strategic materials moving through tightly managed asset systems.

The intersection between circularity, resilience, and capital allocation

The shift toward circularity is also beginning to align with broader market dynamics. Over the past several years, investors and boards have shown renewed interest in resilience, infrastructure ownership, and supply-chain security, particularly in sectors exposed to geopolitical concentration, energy transition pressures, and AI-driven demand growth. While software-led business models continue to command significant valuations, there is increasing scrutiny around operational resilience and control over critical inputs.

For hardware manufacturers and infrastructure operators, circularity increasingly sits within that conversation. A company with visibility into its material flows, established recovery infrastructure, and retained access to devices at end of life has a different risk profile from one entirely dependent on volatile primary supply chains. While markets may not yet be explicitly valuing recoverable material pools in the same way they value traditional infrastructure assets today, the strategic logic underpinning circularity is becoming easier for leadership teams and investors to recognise.

Designing for recovery from the start

The organisations most likely to capture long-term value from circularity will be those treating it as a design and operational question early, rather than retrofitting it later in response to regulation.

On the product side, that means designing hardware for repair, disassembly, refurbishment, and recovery, as opposed to solely focussing on manufacturing efficiency or product throughput. On the operational side, it means building the data, logistics, and traceability systems required to manage devices and materials across multiple lifecycle stages.

Regulation is likely to accelerate this direction of travel further. While frameworks such as the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and the development of Digital Product Passports are expected to increase requirements around material traceability and lifecycle transparency across product categories, the strategic opportunity extends beyond compliance.

Companies building these capabilities now are developing operational visibility into their own material systems well before that visibility becomes mandatory. This capability is likely to become increasingly valuable as supply-chain pressures intensify.

Who controls the next generation of critical material supply?

For years, circularity in technology has largely been framed through the lens of sustainability reporting, recycling targets, and ESG performance. Those issues remain important, but they no longer represent the full picture.

The materials embedded within device fleets are finite, strategically important, and increasingly exposed to geopolitical risk. The companies building the operational capability to recover and reuse those materials are not simply responding to stakeholder pressure. They are positioning themselves for a market in which control over material flows becomes a more meaningful source of resilience.

While the devices themselves have not changed, the materials inside them have gained strategic value with the growing recognition that they do not stop being valuable once a device reaches the end of its first lifecycle.

How Anthesis can help

Anthesis helps technology companies translate circularity into tangible business value by reimagining products, materials, and revenue models with circularity in mind. From circular design and product stewardship to implementing models like resale, subscription, and Device-as-a-Service, we combine deep tech sector expertise with proven strategies to drive resilience, unlock new revenue streams, and reduce lifecycle impacts.

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