November 19, 2025
What the Global Circularity Protocol v1.0 means for retail brands
November 19, 2025
The Global Circularity Protocol for Business (GCP) is the first standardised framework for how organisations can measure, manage, and communicate circular performance. It was produced by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in collaboration with One Planet Network, and launched at COP30 in Brazil.
It aims to address a critical industry gap: the absence of standardised metrics for circularity have made it difficult for businesses, investors and regulators to align on what success looks like. By providing a strategic commercial framework for circularity the Protocol aims to turn ESG compliance into a competitive advantage, enabling more sustainable investment and innovation.
Circularity is critical to achieving net zero, yet the gap between intention and action remains wide. While resource extraction drives more than 55% of global GHG emissions and over 90% of biodiversity and water stress impacts, penetration of circular business models remains low across most sectors.
The GCP aims to address this gap, enabling capital flows, policy alignment, and scalable transformation, shifting circularity from an environmental goal to a strategic growth driver.
It is becoming a commercial requirement, not a sustainability choice.
As a key player, retail faces a perfect storm of rising materials costs, volatile supply chains, tightening regulation, and changing customer expectations. Brands that continue to rely on linear “take-make-waste” models will be more exposed to these factors, risking margin erosion, reputational damage and competitive ground.
Keeping materials in the loop longer can help to mitigate these risks and at the same time open up new revenue growth opportunities. The GCP gives brands the measurement framework to finally align stakeholders and investors behind these initiatives.
Secondary marketplaces like Vinted, Depop and eBay have shown consistent growth over the last few years. However, many retailers are struggling to achieve meaningful scale in their own circular platforms.
Even Patagonia, a sustainability pioneer, recently disclosed only around 1% of products sold each year are resold on their pre-owned platform. It’s similar volumes for repair. The problem isn't commitment or capability, it's customer experience design.
Circular success requires customers to change their behaviour: return instead of discard, repair instead of replace. But without friction-free experiences and clear value exchange, even well-funded circular infrastructure gets relegated to marketing channel, while ESG targets remain unmet.
As a framework, GCP v1.0 focuses specifically on cycling of physical materials:
Water, energy use, and behavioral aspects fall outside its current scope, keeping early adoption practical while ensuring consistency across sectors.
For retail businesses, the initial scope will support operational mobilisation. But there is an important gap. The customer engagement strategies that will drive circular adoption are notably absent from the Protocol.
The Protocol is designed for all organisations transitioning beyond linear “take-make-waste”. It is intended to be applicable for all sizes, sectors, and geographies, recognising varied maturity and market conditions:
Future iterations will expand into areas highly relevant to retail:
In the meantime, agencies that understand circularity and customer experience can help bridge the gap.
The GCP guidance is based on four key principles of circularity, aiming to align with and expand on the circular economy principles already defined by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation:
To assist organisations with implementing and rolling out circularity, the Protocol also defines five progressive ‘user journey’ stages. These are designed to be flexible and modular so that organisations or all sizes can jump in at the relevant stage, based on existing progress and maturity.
Let’s break these down in more detail, and look at what they mean for retail brands:
This stage ensures circularity is linked directly to commercial priorities, establishing clarity on where value can be created. Teams should agree which products, markets, and outcomes are in scope and define decision-making ownership.
For retail brands: Ensure audience insights are included in the framing exercise. Identify which customer needs and behaviours hold the biggest opportunity, to build confidence that circular any solutions will align with real demand.
Here, businesses assess where resources come from, how they move, and where value leaks across the lifecycle. This enables clear prioritisation of high-impact interventions and early alignment with operational partners.
For retail brands: Mapping must also include the customer journey. Identify points of friction at moments like reuse, repair, and resale where participation determines circular success.
In stage 3, the focus is on collecting consistent, comparable data across inflows, lifetime, recovery, and circular value creation. Standardised indicators show how the business performs today and where the biggest opportunities lie.
For retail brands: Incorporating customer participation metrics, like return rates, resale frequency or lifetime value uplift, will be essential to quantify commercial return and build the business case for scale.
The protocol encourages businesses to adopt a data-driven approach, ensuring insights and results flow into planning and decision making about future product and service design, sourcing and supply chain evolution. Governance, budgeting, and incentives should align across the organisation to shift toward circular value.
For retail brands: Success depends on designing experiences that are intuitive and rewarding for customers to use. This can be achieved through iterative test and refine processes that are driven by user insights at all levels of fidelity.
Performance is shared transparently with stakeholders to enhance credibility, meet reporting needs, and signal leadership. Strong communication supports access to investment and differentiation in the market.
For retail: Communication also needs to inspire trust, participation and loyalty, helping customers see their impact and the value exchange of engagement.
As a retail brand, aligning GCP metrics with the voice of the customer will be crucial to successful adoption. As you prepare and progress through GCP implementation, ask yourself:
If you answered no to any of the above, your circular initiatives risk becoming compliance exercises rather than growth engines.
The GCP provides comprehensive guidance on measuring material flows and reporting performance. It explicitly excludes consumer marketing and behaviour change from the first iteration of the policy.
This creates a blind spot for retail. Consider the key GCP metrics: recovery rates require customers to return products. Lifetime extension requires customers to maintain and repair. Circular revenue requires customers to choose resale or rental.
Every target depends on customer participation, yet the framework treats engagement as a supply chain data point rather than a customer experience challenge.
Successful circular retail initiatives work because they are grounded in good customer experience design. They share characteristics such as:
At each GCP journey stage, how you apply customer experience thinking will strengthen the outcomes both from an impact and a commercial perspective.
For example, consider how you can:
At Subvert Studio, we have developed a Circular CX Framework for designing experiences that make participation across digital touchpoints intuitive, rewarding, and habitual. Applying the framework can help you to build:
Done right, circularity is a key revenue driver, positively impacting everything from acquisition to repeat purchase rates.
GCP v1.0 is a strong foundation, and future versions will explicitly add marketing, consumer behavior and B2C business model guidance. Brands that build digital CX and circular measurement capability now will be better positioned to meet both consumer and regulatory expectations as the protocol expands. As resource and market pressures continue to tighten, brands that adopt circularity early stand to benefit from a serious competition edge too.
Future GCP iterations will add consumer behaviour guidance, but that's 2-3 years away. Brands waiting risk competitive disadvantage: early adopters are learning lessons, building capability and customer trust now. Eventually tightening regulations will prioritise compliance over innovation).
Businesses winning at circularity today started before perfect frameworks existed. By the time v2.0 arrives with explicit consumer guidance, these brands will have proven business cases already at scale.
If you're exploring circular adoption or struggling to scale existing initiatives, let's diagnose where customer engagement and value are leaving the loop.
In a 30-minute discovery call, we'll explore areas such as:
We work through digital CX audits, innovation sprints, and implementation support, but every engagement starts with understanding your specific context.
Book now: https://subvertstudio.co.uk/contact
