Digital Platforms Emerge as Orchestrators of the Circular Plastics Economy

Global demand for plastics has doubled over the past two decades and is on course to double again before 2050, a trajectory that researchers warn could consume roughly fifteen percent of the carbon budget remaining for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius if fossil-based plastics continue on their current path. Beyond climate, plastics press against several other planetary boundaries, including novel entities, biogeochemical flows, and biosphere integrity. Against this backdrop, a new study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology argues that the decisive battleground for sustainable plastics is not the chemistry lab but the digital coordination layer: business-to-business platforms that orchestrate the flow of materials, data, and money across fragmented value chains. Using Resource Orchestration Theory as its analytical lens, the research examines eleven internationally operating platforms, most based in Germany, and reveals how they structure, bundle, and leverage resources to make circular business models economically viable at industrial scale.

The scientific stakes are high. Previous modeling work has demonstrated that only extraordinarily high recycling rates, on the order of ninety-five percent, would allow plastics to remain within their share of climate and biosphere boundaries, and even that may be unrealistic without complementary reuse strategies and alternative carbon feedstocks such as biomass and CO2. Circularity, in other words, cannot be achieved through recycling alone or by isolated firms. It requires rapid, coordinated scaling across complex value chains involving manufacturers, recyclers, logistics providers, brand owners, and regulators. The problem is that plastics value chains are deeply fragmented and riddled with information asymmetries: processors often do not know the exact composition of recyclates, brand owners cannot verify whether secondary materials are free of hazardous additives, and reusable packaging systems struggle with return logistics, cleaning, and traceability. Digital platforms, the study contends, are emerging precisely to close these gaps.

The research team, led by Sophia Botsch of the German Plastics Center SKZ-KFE gGmbH and Julian M. Müller of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, conducted a qualitative case study built on eleven semi-structured expert interviews, each lasting roughly sixty minutes and conducted online between November 2025 and January 2026. The interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, anonymized, and analyzed in MaxQDA following the Gioia methodology, an iterative coding approach that moves from informant-centric first-order concepts to second-order themes and finally to aggregate theoretical dimensions. Secondary material, including descriptions of material and information flows on the platforms, supplemented the interviews. The researchers drew on Resource Orchestration Theory, which describes how firms create value through three sequential activities: structuring resources by acquiring, accumulating, and divesting them; bundling them into stable, enriched, or pioneering combinations; and leveraging those bundles in product markets by mobilizing, coordinating, and deploying them. Applied to platform ecosystems, these activities extend beyond firm boundaries, requiring platform owners to attract heterogeneous participants, design governance and incentive mechanisms, and continuously adapt algorithms, rules, and boundary resources.

The central empirical contribution is the identification of three distinct platform archetypes in the plastics industry: Reusable Packaging Trackers, Reuse and Resale Hubs, and Data Platforms. Each archetype orchestrates a different kind of resource and enables a different circular business model. Reusable Packaging Trackers focus on physical asset management. Their structuring activities involve organizing return and purification infrastructures and standardizing packaging materials. Bundling occurs when the platforms combine physical containers with tracking technologies such as QR codes and Internet of Things sensors, together with logistics data, to guarantee quality and hygiene. Leveraging means scaling circulation loops across regional supply chains, effectively replacing single-use packaging with high-frequency reuse systems. As the founder of one such platform explained, the model amounts to packaging as a service: the platform delivers the packaging, collects it, rinses it, stores it, and issues it again, so customers need not worry about any of the logistics.

The numbers reported by these operators illustrate why cycle speed matters as much as cycle count. The founder of one Reusable Packaging Tracker noted that their best-performing container was used 365 times, while the average container achieved twenty uses, yet half of all containers were used fewer than ten times. In circular economy terms, a fast cycle is crucial: a container that turns over only once a year is, even after a decade, hardly better than a disposable one. This insight connects directly to the biophysical argument at the heart of the study. By orchestrating return, purification, and tracking, these platforms operationalize the principle of keeping products and materials at their highest utility and value for as long as possible, leveraging product life-extension patterns that directly reduce the carbon intensity and linear throughput of the plastics system.

Reuse and Resale Hubs, by contrast, orchestrate market mediation for secondary materials. Their structuring work involves integrating diverse material providers and rigorously standardizing data on material properties and quality. Bundling centers on matching industrial demand with available recyclate supply by combining material origin data with risk management services. Leveraging is expressed through optimized pricing and demand saturation, allowing the platform to act as a digital intermediary that lowers barriers to entry for firms seeking recycled plastics. The market for recycled materials, one platform founder observed, is highly diversified and complex despite not appearing so from the outside, and the main customer benefit is faster orientation within it. These hubs attack the critical market failure of information asymmetry. By standardizing quality data and certifying material providers, they make high-quality secondary material scalable. Notably, because many marketplaces cannot themselves guarantee material quality, they build trust incrementally: tests are carried out quickly, buyer feedback is fed back into the system, and data accumulates over time, steadily raising the probability that a given material will suit a given processor.

The third archetype, Data Platforms, orchestrates the intangible data layer of the value chain. Structuring involves collecting product data across the entire lifecycle into standardized formats. Bundling emphasizes interoperability and regulatory compliance, ensuring that information can flow securely between organizations. Leveraging is achieved by reducing information asymmetries across whole sectors, enabling complex circular strategies, and helping participants meet global reporting requirements through tools such as digital product passports. One data platform founder summarized the philosophy bluntly: you cannot circularize what you cannot measure. Many of these platforms were not conceived as circular economy ventures at all; rather, the circular agenda pushed them toward digital product passports. By using data customers already possess, creating transparency on top of it, and automating processes such as reordering, invoicing, and account reconciliation, they map the chemical identity of materials without forcing firms to surrender commercial secrets, often using confidentiality-preserving technologies such as blockchain and zero-knowledge proofs.

The theoretical implications are significant. First, the study shows that in circular ecosystems, orchestration is not a firm-centric endeavor but a meta-organizational capability: platforms must structure and bundle resources, such as material quality data and complementor networks, that they do not legally own. Their value proposition rests on aligning the heterogeneous motives of recyclers, brand owners, processors, and service providers with regulatory compliance. Second, circular business model patterns such as resource recovery and product life-extension are revealed to be dynamic outputs of specific orchestration moves rather than static design categories. Third, the research addresses a well-documented gap in platform scholarship, where business-to-business platforms remain understudied compared to consumer-facing ones. Industrial network effects, the authors find, differ fundamentally from consumer network effects: they are driven by technical standardization and regulatory compliance rather than social interaction, which means platforms must act as institutional anchors that pioneer resource combinations previously considered economically unviable.

Perhaps the most forward-looking finding concerns convergence. Although the three archetypes currently evolve largely in isolation, early signs of integration are emerging. The chief executive of one data platform described how the digital product passport is foreseen as evidence supporting sales on secondary-material marketplaces, allowing buyers of recycled materials to prove that goods genuinely come from second-life sources. Reusable packaging that is digitally monitored effectively carries a digital twin comparable to a product passport, and detailed composition data improves the feasibility of end-of-life treatment. The study envisions these platforms combining into a digital ecosystem in which data and materials cross platform boundaries, generating synergies no single actor could achieve alone. For managers, the message is to choose strategies aligned with their archetype, monetize circular network effects rather than mere transaction fees, and measure success not in gross merchandise volume but in displaced virgin material throughput. The authors caution, however, that many platforms still depend on venture capital or public grants, that high-resolution life cycle assessment data quantifying net environmental benefit is lacking, and that rebound effects from cheaper recyclates could erode gains. The transition to a circular carbon economy, they conclude, cannot be achieved by individual platforms, but platform-mediated ecosystems may supply the coordinated, large-scale intervention the plastics industry urgently needs.

Subject of Research: How B2B digital platforms orchestrate resources to enable circular economy business models in the plastics industry

Article Title: Orchestrating resources for recycling – how digital platforms enable circular economy business models

Article References: Botsch, S., & Müller, J. M. (2026). Orchestrating resources for recycling – how digital platforms enable circular economy business models. Journal of Industrial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00179-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00179-w

Keywords: circular economy, digital platforms, plastics industry, recycling, resource orchestration theory, business models, digital product passports, industrial ecology, supply chain management, reusable packaging, planetary boundaries, B2B marketplaces