A circular economy maintenance strategy approaches equipment maintenance with the goal of keeping assets, components and materials useful for as long as practical. Instead of treating replacement and disposal as the default response to aging equipment, manufacturers evaluate opportunities to maintain, repair, reuse, refurbish, or remanufacture assets and components.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation defines the circular economy around three principles: eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials at their highest value and regenerate nature. Maintenance supports the second principle because maintaining, repairing and refurbishing products can keep them in circulation.
For manufacturers, a circular maintenance strategy can connect reliability practices with broader sustainability and resource-management objectives. The appropriate approach depends on equipment condition, safety requirements, available parts, operational demands, and the feasibility of repair or reuse.
Setting the context and objectives
Define what the maintenance strategy needs to accomplish before selecting circular initiatives. Start with current asset performance, maintenance requirements and material flows. Identify equipment and components that account for significant replacement activity.
Maintenance teams can review repair histories, discarded parts, spare-parts consumption and current refurbishment practices. They should also consider regulatory requirements, customer expectations and corporate sustainability objectives.
Set measurable goals rather than assuming circular practices will automatically produce environmental or operational improvements. Goals might include increasing the percentage of components evaluated for repair, tracking parts reuse or measuring how much material enters established recovery programs.
Applying circular economy principles to maintenance
Connect maintenance decisions to the three principles of the circular economy. Eliminating waste can involve reducing unnecessary component disposal and improving management of maintenance materials. Circulating products and materials can involve maintenance, reuse, repair, refurbishment, and remanufacturing. Regeneration has a less direct relationship with industrial maintenance but remains relevant to the broader environmental goals of a circular system.
Design also matters. In a circular economy, products and materials are designed to stay in circulation. In an industrial setting, modular components, accessible service points, and replaceable wear parts may make future maintenance and repair more practical.
Understanding maintenance’s role in a circular economy
Use maintenance to preserve equipment and component value where technically and economically appropriate. Traditional linear material flows can follow a take, make and discard pattern. A circular approach considers whether a component can remain in its current application before moving toward replacement or material recovery.
This makes sustainable maintenance broader than simply changing maintenance intervals. It can include repairability, spare-parts management, component refurbishment, equipment modernization, and decisions about what happens to parts removed from service.
Safety, reliability and production requirements still take priority. A circular strategy should not keep a component in operation simply to avoid replacement. Maintenance teams need defined inspection and acceptance criteria to determine when continued use, repair or replacement is appropriate.
Developing circular strategies for maintenance
Inventory existing repair, refurbishment and remanufacturing options. Determine which components can be repaired internally and which require qualified outside services. Prioritize opportunities according to feasibility, equipment criticality, environmental considerations, and cost. For example, a repairable mechanical assembly may present a different opportunity than a consumable component that cannot safely be restored.
Evaluate spare-parts waste at the same time. Identify unused inventory, repairable components and parts that currently leave the facility as waste. Standardized procedures for inspection, reconditioning, storage, and return can create a more structured process for keeping usable materials in circulation.
If your facility is looking at how to keep more spare parts in service, talk with an ATS expert about repairable parts management. We can help your team cut avoidable parts waste and keep production running.
Building a circular economy action plan
Introduce circular maintenance practices in manageable phases.
Begin with a defined asset class, production area or component category. Establish baseline measurements before changing procedures. A pilot can provide information about repair feasibility, turnaround time, quality requirements, and administrative needs before the organization expands the program.
Assign responsibilities across maintenance, procurement and logistics. Maintenance personnel can establish technical acceptance criteria. Procurement can incorporate repairability and supplier programs into purchasing decisions. Logistics can manage the movement and tracking of components, leaving the facility for repair or remanufacturing.
Review the results periodically and adjust the process when operating conditions or business requirements change.
Measuring environmental impact
Measure environmental outcomes using a defined methodology.
A life cycle assessment can examine environmental impacts across specified stages of a product or component’s life. Clearly define the assessment boundaries because results can change depending on which materials, processes, transportation activities, and operating phases are included.
Avoid assuming that repair or reuse always produces a specific carbon reduction. Instead, compare alternatives using documented assumptions and report estimated results as ranges when uncertainty is significant.
Maintenance teams can also track operational indicators such as component reuse rates, repair turnaround times and the proportion of removed parts routed to repair, remanufacturing or approved material recovery.
Using preventive and predictive maintenance
Integrate circular objectives with existing maintenance strategies rather than treating them as separate programs.
Preventive maintenance uses defined schedules or usage intervals to initiate maintenance activities. Predictive maintenance uses equipment condition data to support maintenance decisions. Sensors may monitor variables such as vibration, temperature or other process-specific measurements.
These technologies can provide information about asset condition. They do not guarantee that failures will be prevented or that equipment will operate for a specific amount of additional time.
Use condition data alongside inspection findings, maintenance history and operating requirements. This approach can support decisions about whether components should remain in service, receive additional inspection or enter a repair process.
Supporting circular maintenance with data and skills
Track assets and components throughout their maintenance lifecycle. Asset management systems can record installation dates, repairs, inspections, and component replacements. Organizations implementing reuse programs may also need records showing where components came from and whether they meet established acceptance criteria.
Build workforce skills around these processes. Training may cover diagnostics, repair procedures, inspection requirements, component handling, and documentation. Define competency and quality requirements for specialized repair or reconditioning tasks. Circularity should not override technical specifications, safety requirements or established quality controls.
Measuring progress and managing trade-offs
Choose KPIs that show whether the strategy is changing material flows and maintenance practices. Measures could include parts reuse rates, repair turnaround time, the percentage of eligible components sent for refurbishment and material recovery rates.
Traditional reliability measures can remain part of the evaluation. However, improvements should not automatically be attributed to circular practices without supporting evidence.
Circular maintenance also involves trade-offs. Repair programs require labor, technical capabilities, logistics and sometimes additional inventory. Remanufacturing may not be available for every component. Older equipment may also reach a point where continued refurbishment is less practical than replacement.
A circular economy maintenance strategy provides a framework for evaluating these decisions systematically. Efficient maintenance in this context means using equipment, parts and maintenance resources appropriately while meeting operational requirements.
ATS supports manufacturers through industrial maintenance, reliability and asset management services. If your team is weighing circular maintenance practices, talk with an ATS expert about where repair, reuse and refurbishment fit in your maintenance program.
References
Ellen MacArthur Foundation. (n.d.). Circular economy introduction. Retrieved October 19, 2026, from https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/topics/circular-economy-introduction/overview
