How long can your supply chain count on the materials it needs?
How does a material that took billions of years to form end up with a hundred years left? Tungsten has been used in metal cutting since the 1920s, and most cutting tools still depend on it. Today, it isn't the only important resource under pressure. Cobalt, tantalum, and gold face the same combination of supply concentration and export controls, which makes circularity a sourcing question as much as an environmental one.
Our white paper on circular manufacturing explores what it takes to keep critical materials in use for longer.
- How the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's Butterfly Diagram applies to manufacturing
- The business value of circularity beyond sustainability targets
- Four circular business models, from designing for durability to service-based offerings
- What happens to a carbide tool once it wears out
- The metrics that make circular progress measurable
Every resource on board has to last the whole journey
When Ellen MacArthur sailed solo around the world, everything she carried was finite and impossible to replace at sea. That experience shaped how she came to think about the planet's resources, and it became the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which went on to define the circular economy.
The white paper applies the same thinking to manufacturing, where success increasingly depends on how intelligently we design, use, and recover what we make.
Nothing in nature moves in a straight line
Industrial production has traditionally worked the other way. Extract, use, discard. In an ecosystem, everything gets reabsorbed eventually, and circularity brings that thinking to manufacturing by keeping materials moving through repair, reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling for as long as possible.
The payoff reaches well beyond environmental impact, from lower tooling costs and more secure sourcing to longer customer relationships and the data a circular value chain generates along the way.
Most manufacturers are already recycling carbide, and far fewer have a plan behind it
Our manufacturing wellness report, based on nearly 1,000 manufacturers, found that a strong majority are taking at least one action to improve circularity. The most common are recycling carbide tools and inserts, reconditioning worn tools, recycling scrap metal, and recycling packaging.
- 19% of manufacturers have a formal circularity policy
- 2x as many circularity actions are taken by those with a policy
- 10% use a tool to forecast emissions
A formal approach brings the targets, tracking, and accountability that turn individual actions into a system, and that's where most of the untapped progress sits.
Up to 95% of a used carbide insert can be recycled
Worn tools still hold valuable material, and getting it back into circulation is one of the simplest places to start. Find out how our carbide recycling program works and what your used tools are worth.
Where does your operation stand on circularity?
Choosing the sustainable path is one of the eight habits of manufacturing wellness. Our assessment takes about ten minutes and shows where your business stands across all eight, what's working, where the gaps are, and how you compare to your peers.
