Circular Economy Adoption in Germany's Electrical Installation Sector

ABSTRACT The transition towards a circular economy is gaining importance across industries. However, its implementation remains uneven, particularly in highly regulated and safety‐critical sectors. This study examines the adoption of circular economy practices in the German electrical installation industry, characterised by standardised, long‐lived, and plastic‐intensive products coupled with stringent regulatory requirements. Building on a systematic literature review complemented by contextual secondary data, the study identifies a persistent gap between strategic commitment to circularity and its implementation at the product level. The findings consolidate existing CE adoption research into three established domains: technical feasibility, market and network embeddedness, and organisational translation capacity. The study's contribution therefore lies not in presenting these domains as new adoption factors, but in developing an interpretative account of how such conditions may be organisationally interpreted, filtered, delayed, and translated into decisions in highly regulated and safety‐critical industries.