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The academic literature offers some insights about lagging progress on circular economy (CE) transition, including cultural, regulatory, market, and technical barriers. There is also an increasing body of knowledge about barriers to CE adoption that takes a macro‐level perspective across industries. However, such studies have largely neglected the industry scale. This study fills that gap by examining barriers to CE transition in the Dutch technical and interior textiles industries. Using data from 27 interviews with manufacturers and retailers, the study finds that high costs for production and marketing, along with lack of consumer interest, are among the most substantial barriers. To provide a system‐wide perspective, the study conceptualizes relationships among barriers as a chain reaction: limited knowledge of CE design options raises the difficulty and cost of delivering high‐quality circular products at the firm level, while limited availability of circular supply streams combined with the orientation of existing production systems toward linear supply chains constrain CE transition at the industry level. These findings highlight the need for intervention at levels beyond the scale of individual firms, a key implication for public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The circular economy (CE) concept is much-heralded among policy-makers, scholars and industry professionals as an accelerated pathway towards sustainability. This move away from the dominant linear system where products are discarded at the end of product lifecycle is deemed necessary since it is the main cause of an accelerated resource consumption. Business models are considered as a key enabler for the shift from a linear to a CE. However, research on circular business models has mainly focused on circular approaches adopted by incumbent firms, while the contributions of newly established firms (the authors call these 'circular start-ups') have been largely overlooked. This article scrutinises the business models of circular start-ups and how they may differ from those of incumbent firms embracing CE. For this, it analyses the circular business model strategies and innovations adopted by circular start-ups, relying on a novel data sample of 128 circular start-ups identified in three major CE ecosystems in Europe: the Randstad region in the Netherlands, Berlin and London. Based on this data, a novel typology of circular start-ups is proposed, distinguishing between five circular start-up archetypes: design-based, waste-based, platform-based, service-based and nature-based start-ups. The results also show that circular start-ups tend to embrace strategies corresponding to higher levels of circularity than those of incumbents. This preliminarily suggests that circular start-ups can indeed make major contributions to transitioning towards CE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]