Circular Supply Chain Strategy: Why Reverse Supply Chains Require Coalition Building, Not Solo Action | CSCC × Supply Chain Revolution Series (1 of 5)

We understand everything that happens on the front end of the supply chain. Where something is extracted, processed, manufactured, distributed, placed on shelf, sold. And then after point of sale? Nothing. It is the dark side of the moon. That line from Anita Schwartz stopped me in my tracks—and it frames every conversation in this five-part series on building circular supply chains from coalition to community.

Two Lenses, One Coalition: How CSCC Started at a GreenBiz Panel

Anita Schwartz comes from the world of waste. She spent over ten years at Waste Management, then moved to WSP where she built out the zero waste and circular economy practice within their Sustainability, Energy and Climate Change division. By the time she left, she had grown a team from a handful of consultants to a significant book of business with enterprise clients. Through all of that work, one pattern kept emerging: a single company cannot resolve the reverse supply chain on its own. Multiple collection points and shared reverse logistics infrastructure are the unlock—not another individual corporate pilot.

John Holm cut his supply chain teeth in Central and Eastern Europe, helping companies build supply chains from the ground up through market entry strategies for global brands. He found Pyxera Global and started leading their circular economy practice in 2017–2018, initially focused on plastic waste streams in Ghana and with tribal communities in Alaska. What he saw firsthand on the ground reshaped his entire orientation: all the waste streams in the world are centered in the most marginalized communities. From that vantage point, he moved into reverse logistics, local community engagement, and the centering of community agency in circular systems.

They connected at a GreenBiz panel in 2021 and immediately recognized that their perspectives were not just compatible but architecturally complementary. John brings the enabling environment lens: policy, subsidies, state and city relationships, and community agency. Anita brings the private-sector operations lens: waste management infrastructure, buyer/operator friction, and the implementation realities of moving material through real systems. Together, they co-founded the Circular Supply Chain Coalition.

After Point of Sale, It Is the Dark Side of the Moon

Anita's description of the reverse supply chain data gap is the most precise framing I have heard. We have full visibility from extraction to point of sale. We know where materials are sourced, how they are processed, where products are manufactured, how they are distributed, and when they are sold. And then after the transaction closes? The data goes completely dark. No visibility into where materials go, how much is available, at what quality, at what frequency.

This data gap is not an abstract measurement problem. It is the structural reason why reverse supply chains have not scaled. Companies cannot build business cases for material recovery when they have no reliable information about what materials exist, where they are, and whether they can be recovered at a quality and volume that justifies the logistics. Infrastructure has been developed reactively—responding to policy that prohibits certain materials from landfill, or reacting to the proliferation of a particular waste stream—rather than strategically treating waste as a resource with measurable value.

It Is Not Circular Economy. It Is Security Economy.

John reframed the entire conversation on the podcast, and the reframe matters. Stop framing circular economy as sustainability. Frame it as: how are you securing the finite materials you need? How are you competing for materials that have already been extracted? How are you mitigating supply chain risk through local critical mineral procurement?

Reuse is now a geopolitical imperative. Materials are not infinite. The companies that build reverse supply chains first will have a structural competitive advantage—not because they are more sustainable, but because they are more secure. John's approach to corporations is deliberately not through the traditional sustainability door. He is not going to the CSO to talk about ESG reporting and greenhouse gas reductions. He is going to the CFO, the supply chain team, and the business development team with a different message: you need to secure your material streams while you can.

That reframing carries a deeper insight. Seventy to eighty percent of the world already lives on reduced, reused, and repurposed behaviors. It is not a lifestyle choice. It is a survival strategy. And that behavior is neither subsidized nor incentivized. CSCC's ambition is to unlock that existing reuse infrastructure and connect it to the corporate material recovery systems that need it—centering the communities that have always practiced circularity as participants with agency and ownership, not just as collection points.

Why One Company Cannot Build a Reverse Supply Chain Alone

When I challenged John and Anita on whether companies could solve the reverse supply chain individually, Anita's answer was definitive. Individual companies hit a saturation point with diminishing returns. A company can set up its own reverse logistics, build warehousing, create collection infrastructure—but each individual reverse supply chain creates its own footprint. If every company builds that footprint independently, the cost and environmental impact negate the benefit they are trying to capture.

John added a dimension that most circularity conversations miss. Companies with strong reverse supply chains already exist. They just do not share what they have built because it is a competitive advantage. CSCC's argument is that the infrastructure for material recovery creates more value when it is shared than when it is hoarded. The model is not new—in specialty chemicals, competitors routinely collaborate because their waste streams have high value. One company owns the reprocessing capability and sells the recovered material to competitors. What CSCC is doing is replicating that cross-sector collaboration model and applying it to critical minerals, electronics, batteries, and automotive materials.

Supply Chain as Systems Change: Policy, Private Sector, and Community

The CSCC views supply chain transformation as a systems change approach that operates across three interlocking layers. The first is the enabling environment: subsidies, incentives, and policy mechanisms that unlock the economics of reverse material flows. The second is the private sector: companies that already understand reverse supply chain as a competitive advantage and are willing to collaborate on shared infrastructure. The third is community: local procurement, local waste streams, and the re-centering of economic development so that the communities hosting circular infrastructure have agency around their material streams.

The coalition is operating in four regions—North America (US and Canada), the European Union, India, and Southeast Asia (including Japan, South Korea, and Singapore)—and is focusing initially on automotive and technology as target industries. The approach is to convene the entire value chain: consumers and communities as the first levers, the enabling environment as the governance layer, and the operational companies—the processors, recyclers, remanufacturers, and logistics providers—as the execution layer.

Anita described the alignment challenge clearly: building trust among competitors requires elevating individual organizational concerns to the level of industry-wide challenges. Once participants recognize that their problems are not unique to their organization but ubiquitous across their sector, and once a common language and shared infrastructure emerge, that is where the real progress happens.

What Comes Next: The Five-Part Series Arc

This episode is the genesis. The remaining four episodes build on it by addressing the specific mechanisms required to make circular supply chains operational, investable, and community-centered.

Episode 2: The Network — Convening Conveners

How CSCC builds and governs its network of partners, including revenue-share relationships with organizations like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and SP for the Environment. How to tap into existing membership ecosystems rather than building from scratch.

Episode 3: The Buyer Consortium — Reverse Supply Chain Matchmaking

How the coalition actively matches recyclers, processors, and logistics operators with industrial buyers. Features companies including Cummins, Cyclic Materials, and American Battery Technology Company. Curated membership, not open-door—with clear criteria for who gets in.

Episode 4: The Enabling Environment — Policy That Unlocks Value

State-level policy as the lever for circular economy infrastructure. Profiles New Mexico and Maryland as first-mover states aligning workforce development, environmental policy, and economic development. US-EU harmonization of circular economy legislation at the state level.

Episode 5: Community Ownership — The Trojan Horse

How to design reverse supply chain infrastructure so that communities have agency and ownership from inception. Co-op models, collective agency for micro, small, and medium enterprises, and place-based local remanufacturing as an alternative to extractive oligopolies.

Subscribe to Supply Chain Revolution to follow the full series.

Lightning Round: Three Answers, Zero Hesitation

What is the biggest misconception about the circular economy right now?

Anita, without hesitation: that it is recycling. Circular economy is a systems-level transformation that encompasses reuse, remanufacturing, material recovery, reverse logistics, policy design, and community ownership. Reducing it to recycling misrepresents both the scale of the challenge and the scale of the opportunity.

What should companies stop doing when they talk about circularity?

John, one word: lying. No elaboration needed. If your circular economy strategy does not include a plan for reverse logistics, material recovery, and buyer commitment for secondary materials, it is a marketing strategy, not a circular strategy.

What gives the most optimism about CSCC’s next phase?

Anita named the collective interest—the growing number of organizations across industries that see the value and want to participate. John named implementation—the shift from talking about what should be done to actually getting to work.

Advisory Partnership Announcement

This series marks an advisory partnership between Pyxera Global / CSCC and Supply Chain Queen / Supply Chain Revolution. The relationship between Pyxera Global and Supply Chain Revolution extends to the earliest episodes of the podcast, and this series represents the next evolution: a structured, five-part investigation into how reverse supply chains are actually built. John is a friend of the podcast and a returning guest. Anita is joining for the first time, and the depth of operational experience she brings to this conversation is exactly what the circular economy discourse needs.

For organizations interested in engaging with CSCC—whether as manufacturers, buyers, recyclers, policymakers, funders, or community partners—the coalition is actively seeking members across all four operating regions. Visit circularsupplychain.org or connect with John Holm and Anita Schwartz on LinkedIn.