Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Supply Chain Sustainability: Circular Economy & Resiliency Secrets

27 Feb 2026 · 2 min

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1:40

In this interview excerpt, the speakers discuss how circular economy principles reshape supply‑chain relationships. They explain that in a circular system, a company’s customer can become its supplier and vice‑versa, and even competitors may turn into material sources, creating new side‑streams of material flow. This re‑configuration promises greater resiliency by allowing firms to reuse existing materials rather than extracting new resources. However, sharing detailed supply‑chain composition is sensitive because it reveals intellectual property. To address this, the speakers propose broadcasting a “supply signal” that advertises available surplus materials without exposing proprietary details, enabling other firms to request and exchange those resources, effectively flipping the traditional demand‑driven model.

Chapters

You mentioned something which is a big part of sustainability is every supply chain becomes a source of raw materials for another supply chain. And one of the first words that came into my mind was resiliency. How important is this to manage those ebbs and flows between major disruptions? Because I could imagine only several years back that apple cart was highly upset.
Yes. So the interesting thing, if we imagine circular flows, is that your customer becomes your supplier and your supplier can become your customer. And if you look sideways, so there's upstream and downstream, and I think we have more side streams in the future than we do today. So your competitors might actually become sources of material for you as well. So if we think about this idea of changing material among our operations, materials or components or even finished goods instead of from the planet, right? So the idea is how do we make better use of all this material that we already have in our economies? Then we need to shift the way that we communicate about what's in our supply chains. This is really sensitive, of course, because we don't really want to share what's in our supply chains because that's sort of our IP. So this becomes a tough one to do. But if we can find clever ways to put out what I call a supply signal out into the world to say, this is what I have up for grabs, and then to have a way for other supply chain to say, look, I would actually love that. It flips it on its head a little bit instead of saying, here's what I need. Can somebody come and tell me if they can fulfill that?