Circularity Beyond Recycling: Unlocking Resource Value Retention in Business Innovations for Responsible Production and Consumption

ABSTRACT Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires production and consumption systems that safeguard natural resources while supporting economic competitiveness and social well‐being. The circular economy (CE) offers a promising pathway to this transformation, yet many current practices remain narrowly focused on recycling, often overlooking broader opportunities to preserve the value embedded in products, components, and materials. This study introduces a resource value retention (RVR) capacity framework to explore how businesses advance sustainable development through circular business models (CBMs) and circular preservation strategies (CPSs). The framework is applied to 149 European CE good practices drawn from the European circular economy stakeholder platform (ECESP). Findings reveal that corporate circular innovations remain predominantly oriented towards material recovery and recycling, while higher‐value strategies targeting product functionality, life extension, and component recovery are substantially underrepresented. This pattern, further reflected in the dominance of core technology‐based business models over consumer‐oriented and life‐extension approaches, exposes a systemic gap between CE 3.0 ambitions and current business practice, with significant implications for the pace and depth of the transition towards responsible consumption and production. The RVR framework complements existing circularity metrics by offering a practice‐oriented tool to assess how corporate innovations contribute to more sustainable and competitive production and consumption systems. The study offers actionable insights for firms, industry leaders, and policymakers committed to accelerating the circular transition and advancing progress towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.