Financing the system rather than the actors inside it. The phrase comes from
an investor quoted in the PREVENT Waste Alliance study (2025, p. 28) and
reproduced in Wechsel-Geld
(sources/roechling/2026-08-01-polyproblem-08-wechsel-geld.md, p. 6):
“Wir müssen anfangen, über die Finanzierung des Systems nachzudenken, anstatt einzelne Akteure innerhalb des Systems zu finanzieren.”
Why single-actor financing fails here
A circular business case does not close inside one balance sheet. Wechsel-Geld states the structure twice, from opposite ends of the value chain:
- Product side (p. 22): “Eine gut konzipierte Verpackung bleibt linear, wenn sie nicht getrennt gesammelt wird, Sortieranlagen sie nicht erkennen oder kein Markt für das zurückgewonnene Material existiert. Die Investition in das eigene Produkt zahlt sich daher nur aus, wenn andere Unternehmen und die öffentliche Infrastruktur gleichzeitig investieren.” And: “Jeder Akteur trägt die Kosten seiner eigenen Umstellung, der wirtschaftliche und ökologische Erfolg hängt aber von Entscheidungen ab, die an anderen Stellen der Wertschöpfungskette getroffen werden.”
- Financier side (p. 34, Marcela Betancourt Munoz, IDB Invest): “Eines der fehlenden Elemente ist, wie man die verschiedenen Ökosysteme miteinander verbindet. … Noch immer funktionieren viele dieser Projekte als isolierte Kreisläufe statt als Teil eines vollständig vernetzten zirkulären Ökosystems.” The failure mode she names is concrete: “Man findet Projekte, die den Kreislauf intern schließen. Aber dann haben sie keine Kunden für ihr Produkt.”
The Schwalbe case is the positive instance (p. 22): the take-back system required specialist retail to accept used tyres, logistics partners to aggregate and move them, a technology firm to recover usable components, and R&D to ensure the recovered material goes back into tyres. “Der Wert entsteht somit nicht in einem einzelnen Unternehmen. Er entsteht in der Verbindung verschiedener Akteure. Jeder von ihnen benötigt eine wirtschaftliche Motivation, sich dauerhaft zu beteiligen.”
The negative instance is PreZero: a group rich enough to buy its own entire loop, running it at a loss of €386m in 2024 (p. 23). The report’s own conclusion — “Kaum jemand hat diese Möglichkeiten” — closes the vertical-integration escape route for everyone else.
The two unanswered questions the report leaves
Stated verbatim (p. 23):
- “wie eine gemeinsame Infrastruktur finanziert …” — who pays for take-back logistics, recycling capacity under fluctuating recyclate demand, better sortability;
- ”… und der daraus entstehende Wert verteilt wird” — how firms investing today are rewarded for benefits that only materialise in a value chain that works tomorrow.
These are precisely Martin’s question 4 (who pays for shared standards, calculations, data spaces and governance after the pilot phase), asked independently by a financing report that does not answer it.
⟨Inference: financing and distribution together is a governance design question, not a funding question — which is why Ostrom’s commons design principles are the relevant literature rather than development-finance instruments. Ostrom’s principles 2 (congruence between appropriation/provision rules and local conditions) and 3 (collective-choice arrangements) are exactly the “wer trägt / wer profitiert” pairing the report poses and drops.⟩
Why this is harder than it sounds: synchronisation
The report’s own closing correction (p. 23): the challenge is not only financing the transition but doing it “synchronisiert … unternehmensübergreifend und entlang der Wertschöpfungskette.”
⟨Inference: synchronisation is the diagnostic marker of a coordination failure, not a bargaining failure — the parties want the same end state and fail on timing and mutual assurance, not on dividing a surplus. Run the test from coordination vs. bargaining failure: would the packaging producer, the sorter and the recycler each invest if they simply knew what the others would do? On the report’s own account, yes. That makes credible information about others’ commitments — not more capital — the binding constraint, which is a solvable infrastructure problem.⟩
Note the tension with the PreZero evidence: Schwarz Gruppe did know what the others would do, because it owned them, and still lost money. ⟨Inference: so coordination is necessary but not sufficient; the loop also has to be economic at current relative prices, which is Hafenmayer’s and Timmermans’ point about virgin material being cheaper than recyclate.⟩
Instruments named in the source
| Instrument | Who names it | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Blended finance; state takes guarantees, Bürgschaften or first-loss tranches | Stremlau | p. 9 |
| 90-10 rule — 90% of transformation finance is private, 10% public | Stremlau | p. 10 |
| MDB participation as a de-risking signal: “Wenn wir an einer Transaktion beteiligt sind, wird das oft als sicherer wahrgenommen” | Betancourt Munoz | p. 35 |
| Loans combined with technical assistance, blended finance, sustainability-linked instruments, policy support | Betancourt Munoz | p. 35 |
| Taxonomy / shared language | Betancourt Munoz | p. 35 |
| Standards, Dateninfrastrukturen, Förderprogramme, regulatorische Anreize | Gruber (DKB) | p. 33 |
| Regulation as an investment signal (PPWR) | report | p. 6 |
| European capital union; ETS revenues into a Norway-style fund | Timmermans | pp. 38–39 |
| Landesbürgschaft (Hamburg, for Traceless) — explicitly criticised as a one-off | Thoma / report | p. 15 |
| Rabobank “Circular Entrepreneurship Desk” (€270m); Intesa Sanpaolo €11.7bn in 2023 on its own EMF-developed CE methodology | report | p. 6 |
What is absent from every one of them: a mechanism for who owns and runs the shared data layer these instruments presuppose. The taxonomy, the standards and the Gebäuderessourcenpass all require an operator, and no interviewee names one.
The EU’s own instrument list (EEA, 2026)
The EEA financing report publishes the institutional version of the table above, organised by lifecycle stage rather than by speaker (ch. 4):
| Stage | Economic levers | Financing levers |
|---|---|---|
| Design / production | modulated EPR fees, differentiated taxation, Net Zero Industry Act tax credits | blended finance (InvestEU), subordinated finance, EIF venture capital |
| Use | reduced VAT on repair, repair vouchers and repair funds (Right to Repair Directive), circularity criteria in GPP (≈14 % of EU GDP) | product-as-a-service (already EU-Taxonomy eligible), special purpose vehicles, insurance for sharing and second-hand markets |
| End of life | landfill and incineration taxes, deposit return schemes (PPWR), waste export fees | project finance for recycling infrastructure, results-based loans tied to verified waste reduction, green municipal bonds |
The one documented ecosystem-scale actor is the EIB: 153 circular economy projects, EUR 5.1 bn, 2020–2024, screened against the EU Taxonomy. The report qualifies its own case study — “EIB investments are a small share of the current level of investment and many EIB-funded projects remain waste-related” (Box 4.1).
This does not answer the open question below. Every instrument in the table finances a single actor or a single stage. None of them conditions one actor’s funding on another’s participation, which is what ecosystem-level financing would mean. The nearest thing — “results-based loans tied to verified waste reduction” — is still a bilateral contract between one lender and one borrower, and the word “verified” carries the whole weight without any mechanism attached to it.
⟨Inference: “results-based loans tied to verified waste reduction” is the single line in the EEA report where SINE’s instrument is implied and not named. A results-based loan needs a result that both parties can check; that is a measurement and attestation problem, not a finance-product problem. Worth quoting at the camp precisely because the EEA proposes the product and leaves the verification blank.⟩
Note also that §3.2.3 finds the existing economic instruments pointing the wrong way: EPR schemes “do not currently incentivise upstream circular strategies such as eco-design and resource efficiency” (Lifset et al., 2023), tax systems do not reward repair, reuse or remanufacturing, and fossil subsidies artificially lower the cost of virgin material. And §3.1.3 adds a structural mismatch the Wechselgeld report does not name: public finance is CAPEX-focused while circular business models are OPEX-heavy (Naumov et al., 2025).
Two instruments the finance reports do not have (POLYPROBLEM 06, 2023) ⟨2026-11-06⟩
Source: Der Circularity Code. The data-and-digitalisation report of the same series, three years before Wechsel-Geld, and the operational pre-history of its “nicht Mangel an Kapital, sondern an dessen Lenkung”. Its own headline on p. 12 states the problem in one line: “Die Technik ist vorhanden, das Geschäftsmodell nicht.”
Both instruments it names are absent from the table above and from the EEA list, and both are of a different kind: they do not supply capital, they change the expected return of the party that has to bear the cost.
| Instrument | Who names it | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Long-term industry offtake guarantees, alongside better state funding | Markus Helftewes (Der Grüne Punkt) | p. 13 |
| A noticeable single-use levy, proceeds earmarked for reuse return and washing logistics | report, as the point of agreement among reuse-market actors | p. 25 |
Helftewes, on who re-equips the sorting plants for HolyGrail 2.0 watermarks — “Wer stemmt die dafür notwendigen Investitionen?” — treats the financing question as the larger challenge than the technology:
Aber die Frage ist, wer bereit ist, die Mehrkosten solcher Entwicklungen zu tragen
„Zirkularität gibt es nicht zum Nulltarif“ […] Selbst, wenn die digitale Technologie im Recycling funktioniert, gibt es dafür noch lange kein funktionierendes Geschäftsmodell – zumindest nicht, solange Rezyklate teurer sind als Neuware.
The report names the mechanism directly: “das klassische Henne-Ei-Problem. Sprich: Für die notwendige Skalierung fehlen vielfach noch die marktwirtschaftlichen Anreize.”
⟨Inference: offtake is the standard bankability instrument in project finance — a lender funds an asset against a contracted future revenue stream, not against a market forecast — and this is the wiki’s only source in which a circular-economy practitioner asks for it by name. It belongs in the table above because it is the cleanest answer available to the question Wechsel-Geld leaves open. Note what distinguishes both of these from everything else listed: blended finance, guarantees, first-loss tranches and MDB participation all reduce the cost of capital for a project whose revenue is already assumed. Offtake and an earmarked levy construct the revenue. Where the problem is that “niemand verdient mit der Rücknahme”, de-risking cheaper capital does nothing.⟩
Why the capital does not arrive: cost-bearer ≠ value-captor
The report supplies five cases, and they have one shape. Recyclers re-equip and brands gain the recyclate claim (pp. 12–13). Restaurateurs take containers back and the system saves (pp. 24–25). Processors hand over production data and the chain gains transparency (pp. 7, 10–11). Bin installers carry hardware whose output someone else needs for CSR/EPR reporting (p. 34). Waste collectors do the low-value collection an EPR filer needs counted (pp. 42–44). The Zwischenfazit asks it as a question, p. 53:
Wer also bezahlt und betreibt digitale Infrastrukturen, die nicht auf mehr Produktivität, sondern auf ressourcenschonendes Wirtschaften ausgelegt sind?
and answers it politically — the state should establish such infrastructure “als ein Gemeingut … wo es noch keine tragfähigen Geschäftsmodelle gibt”.
⟨Inference: this is a sharper diagnosis than the report’s own “Haltung” framing and than Wechsel-Geld’s “Lenkung”. Neither a shortage of capital nor an attitude problem — a missing assignment of cost to return. It also predicts which interventions work: the two instruments above move the cost-bearer’s return and are the only two the interviewees converge on. Same mechanism as the ABtC pattern on the bootstrapping-problem page.⟩
One instance where the private sector did pay for the shared good: Christian Schiller (cirplus), p. 13, “haben wir die DIN SPEC 91446 initiiert und finanziert” — a firm funding a standard because its business model is transparency, i.e. a case where the cost-bearer is the value-captor.
Open questions
- Is there a working example of an ecosystem-level financing vehicle in the circular economy — one instrument financing several actors along a chain conditional on each other’s participation? None appears in this source, and none appears in the EEA’s EU-wide instrument inventory either ⟨2026-11-05⟩.
- Does the “finance the system” framing survive contact with competition law? Coordinated investment along a value chain between competitors is exactly the area Martin’s question 1 flags, and the report is silent on it.
Cross-references
- Coordination vs. bargaining failure
- Ostrom commons governance
- Data-space business models — the same “who pays for shared infrastructure” question in the data layer.
- Data commons
- Circularity valuation gap
- Circular ecosystem maturity stages — the S2→S3 transition is where this page’s open question binds, and the temporal to-do set derived from it ⟨2026-11-06⟩.
- Bootstrapping problem
- Warrantage — a worked example of financing against a collectively verified asset rather than against a single balance sheet.
- Unlocking the circular economy (EEA, 2026) — ch. 4, the EU’s enabler inventory; Box 4.1, the EIB.
Sources
sources/roechling/2026-08-01-polyproblem-08-wechsel-geld.md, p. 6 (PREVENT investor quote; Rabobank, Intesa), pp. 22–23 (Schwalbe, PreZero, the two unanswered questions, synchronisation), pp. 34–35 (Betancourt Munoz), pp. 9–10 (Stremlau), p. 15 (Traceless). Summary: Wechsel-Geld.sources/circular-finance/2026-11-05-eea-unlocking-the-circular-economy/2026-11-05-eea-unlocking-the-circular-economy.md, §3.1.3, §3.2.3, ch. 4, Box 4.1. EEA Report 02/2026, doi:10.2800/5422329. Summary: Unlocking the circular economy.