What circularity practitioners can learn from fast-moving consumer goods

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.​

I recently spoke with a major automaker about their new circular vehicle. While the design was impressive, the timeline was troubling: with a 20-year lifespan, the materials won’t return to the system until the 2040s. It raises a critical question: Can we truly call a product circular if we have to wait two decades to see if the loop actually closes? To be effective, circularity requires return velocity, not just recyclable parts.

Understanding generational speed

This isn’t the first time an industry has made assumptions about future impacts while ignoring generational speed. History is littered with these failures:

• DES (Diethylstilbestrol): Prescribed to millions of pregnant women to prevent miscarriage, premature labor, and related complications in the 1940s through 1971. It caused rare cancers in their daughters a generation later.
• PFAS (Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances): These “forever chemicals” have been used since the 1940s. Their perceived benefits of resisting heat, water, grease and durability became a problem of extreme persistence. It now lingers in the environment and bodies.
• TBT (Tributyltin) was an anti-fouling ship paint hailed as a “green” win for fuel efficiency. But it leached into oceans causing generational sterility for snails, crashing marine populations decades later.

Science learned that generational speed mattered when predicting impact. Which in turn meant testing on faster systems. The reason the fruit fly is so important for science now is due to its rapid life cycle of 10 days, allowing scientists to model 50 generations in short periods and learning loads in the process.

Should we be asking this question of our circular products? How fast do we learn from generational cycles? Are our products flies or elephants? For example, over a five-year period if your product has 10 lifecycles, the customer goes through two of your products a year. That a lot of generations to learn from. 

Taking a page from fast-moving consumer goods 

Although we often berate fast-moving consumer goods for their waste, they may hold the key to solving our circularity problems. A cosmetic product or a T-shirt might complete 40 circularity cycles in the time it takes one car to finish its first. That’s an enormous amount of learning for sustainability professionals to study. Some companies are learning a lot from faster generations. 

Thousand Fell, a New York-based circular footwear brand, didn’t just set out to make a sneaker; they set out to master the ‘return.’ In an industry where shoes usually end up in landfills, Thousand Fell creates sneakers from bio-based materials designed to be fully recycled. But their real innovation isn’t just the material, it’s the velocity of their data in that cycle. While co-founder Stuart Ahlum acknowledges the generational timespan, noting that it takes about 1.5 years for products to be returned, SuperCircle, a reverse logistics company that deals with the backend for Thousand Fell, currently processes 2 million items a year. That’s a lot of generational data to learn from. 

Similarly, the cosmetics company Yan An Tang is another example of high-velocity iteration. They leveraged a base of 280,000 registered users on their app to process over 230,000 return orders — recovering nearly 750,000 empty cosmetic bottles. This isn’t just waste management; it’s a massive data-capture exercise that allows for rapid learning, generational iterations of their packaging, customer behavior and reverse logistics. 

These companies are dealing with fast generational cycles, capturing data in every loop. They’re learning about the weakness in the products, the consumer engagement at a product’s end of life, and the methods and routes of return. Each time they improve, and ship a new product. They’re our metaphorical circularity scientists learning from flies.

What companies can do now

To start looking at your product in generational terms, businesses can: 

Prioritize sub-cycles: Don’t wait for total product failure. Focus on high-turnover components — like batteries or software — to create faster, modular return loops.

Incentivize early returns: Use buy-back guarantees or credits to trigger returns at year three of a 10-year lifespan. This captures materials before they lose value or relevance.

Mitigate obsolescence: Short cycles prevent “material lag.” Recovering a product in three years ensures the materials are still compatible with current recycling tech.

Digitize the return: Use QR codes to turn “empties” into data. This transforms a discarded item into a strategic insight for your next product generation.

Partner with consumers: Shift the narrative from “end-user” to “cycle-partner.” Engaging them as part of the generational loop ensures higher return rates and brand loyalty.

Lastly, look at your product. Learn from its death: Does it have the generational cycle of a fly or an elephant?