Are You Sure Consumers Are the Unlock for Circularity?

written by Deborah Dull, on site at GreenBiz 2026

One of the most repeated excuses in the circular economy space is that American consumers just do not care enough. They will not sort their waste. They will not pay a premium for sustainable products. They will not participate in take-back programs. Europe is different, the story goes. Americans are a lost cause.

Today I sat through a panel where that story got taken apart, piece by piece, with actual data. On this panel were Tom Szaky the CEO at TerraCycle and Loop, Gary Lewis the CEO at Resourcify, Rob Whitter the Head of Climate and Sustainability at Visa, and Casper Venbjerg Hansen the Senior Director of Sustainability Risk & Compliance for Ambu A/S; all facilitated by Lauren Phipps of MOLG.

A company that runs in-store recycling programs across more than a million locations in 20 countries looked at their numbers. Whether someone was bringing back a wetsuit in Japan, cosmetics in France, or gear in the United States, the behavior was statistically identical. You could not tell the countries apart. American consumers who chose to participate were participating at the exact same rate as everyone else.

Then there was the study that compared American, British, and French consumers directly. French consumers said they cared the most about the environment. Americans said they cared the least. That tracks with what everyone assumes. But then the researchers asked a second question: how much are you personally willing to do about it? The French were the worst. Their answer was essentially that the government would handle it. Americans were the best. Their answer was that the government was not going to do anything, so it was on them. When you add the two responses together, the line goes flat. Same behavior, different reasons.

So if consumers are not the problem, what is?

The panel kept coming back to incentives inside the supply chain, and a PPE story made the point better than any framework could. A company built out shared circular infrastructure for protective equipment. They got the cost of virgin materials down by nearly 50% through the shared system. Everything was in place. And then it started falling apart, not because the technology failed, but because one player in the chain realized they could make more money selling their recovered material to a different buyer outside the loop. The system collapsed under its own financial logic.

Sharing infrastructure is not enough. You have to design the financial flows at the same time, so that every party in the chain makes more money staying inside the loop than leaving it.

There was also a sharp point made about pilots. When the stated goal of a pilot is learning, it is already set up to fail. Companies are not universities. The only pilots that actually scale are the ones owned by commercial teams with P&L accountability, where the goal from day one is revenue, not a white paper.

Visa made the same point from a different angle. Their sustainability initiative fumbled for years inside a social impact team. Once it moved into the product organization with real revenue targets attached, it started to work.

The pattern is consistent. Circularity stalls when it lives in a sustainability department. It scales when it lives in a business unit that has to make money.

Consumers are ready. The question is whether the systems we are asking them to participate in are actually designed to work.