Connectivity Is the Circular Economy's Missing Infrastructure

A reflection on our conversation with David Watson of Circular Connect

No single company, product or person will achieve circularity on their own. That is one of the things David Watson, founder of Circular Connect and Chief Client Officer at RL People and RL Equity, keeps coming back to across everything he does. His three businesses are themselves a kind of proof of that principle: a recruitment firm, a mergers and acquisitions brokerage, and a media and community platform, all working the same territory from different angles, all feeding each other.

We had a great conversation with David on the latest episode of HappyPorch Radio, and it touched on something we think about a lot: the gap between the energy that exists within the circular economy and the difficulty of turning that energy into real, scalable change.

Digitising the conference corridor

Circular Connect started as a newsletter in early 2025, born from a specific frustration. David has been working in the circular economy for close to a decade. He goes to the conferences, has the conversations, feels the excitement. And then, as he put it, there is silence for twelve months until the next event.

What he wanted to build was a way to make those connections persistent and searchable. Not to replace the human element, but to stop it from evaporating. The directory that followed the newsletter, which we at HappyPorch helped build, is one part of that. But what David is clear about is that the platform is not a passive listing. The Circular Connect team work proactively with their customers, opening doors and making introductions. The technology creates the surface; the people do the work.

It's a philosophy we recognise from our own experience building tools for the circular economy, including the Circular Tech Map, a searchable directory of digital enablers for circularity. Whether you are looking for traceability software, digital product passport providers, recommerce platforms or data management tools, the Circular Tech Map is built on the same idea: that the right connection, made at the right moment, can genuinely move things forward. Directories and databases like these are complementary pieces of infrastructure for a space that, as David says, is still inherently disjointed.

The opportunity in adjacent skills

One of the most practically useful threads in the conversation was about who can enter the circular economy, and from where.

David's recruitment business, RL People, has been active in the circular economy since 2017. What they have learned is that the skills needed are not always coming from inside the sector. Someone who has spent years selling managed services into data centres or technology environments can walk into a circular service provider and do very well. The product knowledge transfers. The sales motion transfers. What changes is the context and the mission.

This matters because the industry is growing faster than it can staff itself from within. There are only so many people who already identify as circular economy professionals. Bringing in adjacent talent is not a compromise; it's a structural necessity.

The flip side of this is education. David is candid that one of the biggest barriers to entry, for talent and for consumers alike, is that most people have no idea what happens when they return a product. They touched circularity; they just did not know it had a name. Circular Connect's ambition is partly to fix that, surfacing the story of what actually happens in the background to a much wider audience.

Where the investment is going

From his work with RL Equity, David is seeing a clear hotspot of M&A activity right now in hardware decommissioning, driven directly by the growth of AI infrastructure. Data centres and hyperscalers are upgrading at a pace that has never been seen before. That leaves behind technology that is perfectly usable in less intensive environments, but which needs to be decommissioned properly, assessed, recommissioned and passed on to its next owner. The businesses that do this well are attracting serious private equity interest.

It's a vivid example of what circular economy thinking can actually look like in practice: not idealism, but value recovery at scale.

For those in the software and technology space wondering where to focus, David pointed to two areas. Traceability software, which helps organisations across complex, multi-site operations know where their assets actually are, is seeing significant growth. And Digital Product Passports, mandated by incoming European legislation but lacking the software and data infrastructure to deliver on that mandate, represent a genuine build opportunity right now.

Four sales from one product

Perhaps the clearest sign that commercial logic is shifting is what David describes happening with OEMs. Three or four years ago, many were firmly opposed to anything that looked (at first glance) like it might cannibalise new sales. Today, a growing number are actively building or partnering with refurbished and resale channels, not because they have been shamed into it, but because they have done the maths.

One product, sold new and then brought back and resold through a circular channel, repeatedly, can produce four customer relationships instead of one. That's not a sustainability argument. That's a customer acquisition argument. And it's landing.

Consumer sentiment has shifted too, driven largely by cost of living pressures. People are buying refurbished laptops and phones not as a last resort but as a sensible choice, often with warranties and significant price savings. The reluctance now sits more firmly on the business side, in the "we have always done it this way" inertia that David understands, without excusing.

The connective tissue is still missing

What runs through all of this is a recognition that the circular economy has the ideas, the commercial logic, and slowly increasingly the policy tailwind it needs. What it still lacks is the connective tissue: the shared language, the visible infrastructure, the platforms that let a brand looking to launch a resale channel find the right as-a-service provider quickly, without needing to already know the right people.

That's what David is building with Circular Connect. It's what we try to contribute with tools like the Circular Tech Map. And it's, honestly, why conversations like this one feel important.

There is so much opportunity in this space, from growth and innovation through to real commercial scale. But as David put it, we still make it difficult for ourselves. Closing that gap is the work.

You can find the full episode, including transcript and links, at HappyPorch Radio. To explore Circular Connect, head to circularconnect.net. And if you are looking for digital tools that enable circularity, the Circular Tech Map is a good place to start.