NRF Chief Administrative Officer and General Counsel Stephanie Martz speaks at the NRF Circularity Workshop at NRF 2025.
Some of the world’s largest and most well-known retail brands talked about their circularity efforts on stage at NRF 2025: Retail’s Big Show. IKEA, Target and Walmart executives described initiatives to take back products like car seats and blue jeans for recycling (Target), to take back furniture (IKEA) and cell phones (Walmart) for potential resale or recycling, and to sell used and refurbished products in-store (IKEA) and online (Walmart). All three also discussed selling products made from recycled materials.
Behind the scenes at Big Show were even more intriguing circularity conversations involving retail executives from across a wider variety of sectors.
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Circularity is a new name for some of the oldest practices in the retail industry. Since the dawn of retail, there have been retailers focused on selling new products, others focused on selling used products and some who sell both. There have also been networks of service providers that mend and repair products to extend their useful lives and “scrappers” who recycle materials for use in new products.
As populations in major U.S. cities grew, nonprofit organizations like Goodwill, founded in 1902, emerged. They accepted donated items, reselling them to generate money to support their social missions, including providing for and creating jobs for the poor and those with disabilities.
More recently, The Ellen MacArthur Foundation formally defined circularity as a series of practices that eliminate waste and pollution across all industries, regenerate nature, and keep products and materials circulating through the economy at their highest and best use. The foundation promotes practices like reusing, repairing, repurposing and reselling products multiple times and recycling them into their component parts when they are no longer useful.
Circularity also includes redesigning products to be more durable and made from recycled and other environmentally preferable materials that are easily recycled or composted when they are no longer useful.
Retailers are revisiting, revamping and scaling circular business practices within their own operations. Even more importantly, they are seeking ways to collaborate pre-competitively to ensure the needed infrastructure exists to scale circular best practices across the industry.
At NRF 2025, more than 70 retail executives participated in a four-hour, facilitated workshop to share lessons-learned, identify challenges and discuss common infrastructure needs. With support from NRF, Deloitte consultants and other experts, participants discussed retailer initiatives focused on resale, repair, recycling, reuse, donation and re-design.
In addition to the specific activities shared by IKEA, Target and Walmart on the Big Show stage, participants discussed Coach’s collaboration with Bank and Vogue to create its iconic Soho bag from post-consumer denim, Goodwill Industries’ expanding role in the reverse logistics space, how retailers are rethinking design, sourcing and supply chain initiatives to enable circularity, and efforts underway to revitalize the repair industry.
Workshop participants also discussed some internal reasons retailers are pursuing circular solutions including increased consumer demand for value, a desire for shorter, traceable and more resilient supply chains, rising European and U.S. regulatory pressure, the emergence of new enabling technologies, and growing interest from consumers in more sustainable offerings.
Of particular interest to participants was the rise of extended producer responsibility laws across Europe and the United States. In California, for example, the governor recently signed the Responsible Textile Recovery Act into law. It requires fashion, footwear and textile retailers and producers to create a Producer Responsibility Organization to fund and implement the law.
Retail executives spent time addressing how future aspects of the law’s implementation can accelerate circularity or make it more challenging. Narrow definitions of recycling or limitations about the ability to transfer products and materials across state borders, for example, will increase compliance costs for retailers and consumers.
Based on feedback from the workshop, NRF and Deloitte are focusing new attention on some of the opportunities raised during the meeting and identified in the retail circularity action guide we released last year.
The circular retail conversations will continue with retail executives and executives from the software companies and third-party service providers that make circularity possible at the NRF Reverse Logistics Association annual conference in Las Vegas, March 11 – 13.