The bottom line
Products and materials are being redesigned around reuse, recovery, remanufacturing and reduced waste rather than a one-way take-make-discard model.
Why it matters
Circularity becomes more powerful when it is designed into the system from the beginning. That creates new business models around materials recovery, product life extension, traceability and resource productivity.
From the foresight archive
Jim Carroll first published this as Megatrend #8 on 2025-07-07. He revisited it one year later on 2026-08-14, using the retrospective to test the original call against what had happened since.
In that retrospective, Carroll’s own shorthand assessment was: The sectors are proving out the macro number, not just restating it. Electronics, packaging, construction and fashion are each building real markets on what used to be trash — food and agriculture, the fifth pillar I named, is the one still waiting for its breakout year.
This page treats the 2025 article as the original foresight call and the 2026 article as the first evidence checkpoint. Later signals and scorecards can be attached without rewriting the historical record.