From material loops to whole-life value: reframing infrastructure circularity for resilience

Introduction

Circular Economy (CE) frameworks for the built environment predominantly address material recovery and prolonged asset use (Akomea-Frimpong et al., 2024). These perspectives are necessary but insufficient for infrastructure. Infrastructure systems deliver essential services over decades through interconnected physical assets, lifecycle information, organizational relationships, and regulatory arrangements. They may therefore achieve high material recovery while still losing functional capacity, institutional knowledge, adaptive capacity, or opportunities for system-wide value creation. Moreover, circularity does not inherently imply resilience: strategies that maximize resource efficiency may reduce the redundancy, diversity, and spare capacity required to withstand disruption, while increasing interdependencies may introduce new vulnerabilities (Kennedy and Linnenluecke, 2022). This tension becomes particularly important when distinguishing static resilience (SR) as the capacity to maintain functionality during disruption (Deloukas and Apostolopoulou, 2017) from dynamic resilience (DR), which concerns recovery, adaptation, learning, and improvement over time (Pant et al., 2014). We therefore argue that circular infrastructure must move beyond closing material loops toward retaining and regenerating the multiple forms of value required for infrastructure systems to remain functional and adaptable throughout their whole life.

The literature shows that CE research has developed around two dominant perspectives: material-centric circularity, which retains components through reuse, recovery, and design for disassembly (Akomea-Frimpong et al., 2024; Mhatre et al., 2021; Coenen et al., 2021), and use-based circularity, which extends, shares, or reconfigures asset functions to support long-term service delivery (Bayeroju et al., 2021; Piñones et al., 2023). Although valuable, both perspectives remain largely oriented toward buildings and individual assets. As Kaewunruen et al. (2023) argue, infrastructure is a “system of complex functional systems,” where uniform CE strategies are unlikely to succeed because individual subsystems require different circular approaches (Karlovsek et al., 2024). Emerging research further emphasizes lifecycle information, system integration, and institutional coordination in enabling circular infrastructure (Coenen et al., 2023; Kaewunruen et al., 2025; Ahmadi et al., 2026). Our contribution is therefore not another inventory of circular practices, but a reframing of both the object and unit of analysis: from the circulation of physical materials within individual assets to the retention and regeneration of value across infrastructure systems and their governance ecosystems. We conceptualize this shift through five interdependent dimensions; material, functional, informational, systemic, and institutional circularity; each representing a distinct form of value that must remain available across the infrastructure lifecycle (Tsui et al., 2024; Hernando et al., 2024; Mani et al., 2026). Here, value refers to the capacity to deliver required services and associated environmental, social, and economic benefits over time; it is not limited to the market value of recovered materials. Within this framework, resilience is proposed as a cross-cutting test of whether these forms of value can be retained, mobilized, and reconfigured under disruption. Material and functional circularity relate more directly to static resilience, while informational, systemic, and institutional circularity become increasingly important for dynamic resilience through recovery, coordination, learning, and adaptation.

Material circularity

Material-centric circularity remains the most mature and widely adopted dimension of the CE and provides a necessary foundation for circular and resilient infrastructure. Its primary objective is to retain the physical value of materials and components by reducing resource extraction, extending material life, and enabling reuse and recovery. In railway infrastructure, this includes the recycling and reuse of end-of-life rolling stock (Kaewunruen and Lee, 2017), the substitution of virgin materials with secondary resources in track and structural components, and the broader concept of urban mining, which views existing infrastructure stocks as valuable anthropogenic resource reservoirs rather than waste (Liebig-Schultz and Greif, 2026). More broadly, CE research in the built environment remains largely centred on construction and demolition waste management, recycled materials, material recovery, and design for disassembly (Hernández, 2025).

From a resilience perspective, material circularity contributes particularly to static resilience by maintaining access to reusable components, secondary materials, and locally recoverable resource stocks that can support service continuity and restoration when conventional supply chains are disrupted. However, this relationship is not inherently positive. Strategies that maximize material efficiency may reduce inventories, redundancy, or spare capacity that infrastructure systems require during disruptions, creating a potential trade-off between circular efficiency and resilience (Kennedy and Linnenluecke, 2022). Material circularity should therefore seek not simply to minimize material use, but to retain physical resources in forms that remain accessible, reusable, and mobilizable when needed. Nevertheless, material circularity alone provides only a partial view of whole-life infrastructure performance. Infrastructure assets should not be evaluated solely by the quantity of materials recovered at end of life, but also by the value they generate throughout operation (Waring and Liyanage, 2026). A railway system, for example, may achieve high material recycling after decommissioning while remaining inefficient, underutilized, or prematurely replaced during decades of service (O'Leary et al., 2024). Thus, preserving physical resource value does not necessarily preserve infrastructure service value or resilience. This limitation motivates the second dimension (functional circularity) which focuses on retaining, adapting, and maximizing the services delivered by infrastructure throughout its lifecycle.

Functional circularity

Functional circularity focuses on extending, intensifying, and reconfiguring the functions and services provided by infrastructure assets throughout their service life, rather than prioritizing material recovery at end of life (Skare et al., 2024). Consistent with Stahel’s (2019) performance economy, value is retained by maximizing the services derived from existing assets through adaptation, shared use, life extension, and operational optimization rather than through new construction or material replacement. For infrastructure systems designed to operate over several decades, preserving and enhancing functional performance can therefore generate greater whole-life circular value than material recovery alone. Across infrastructure sectors, functional circularity takes different forms. In transportation, it includes maximizing existing corridor capacity and repurposing disused stations and rights-of-way for new functions (Pedata et al., 2024). In water infrastructure, reusing treated effluent and recovering nutrients retain resource value, whereas demand management, modular upgrades, and optimizing existing treatment capacity before expansion retain service value (Riediger et al., 2025). In energy systems, demand-side flexibility and non-wires alternatives can defer additional infrastructure by improving the use of existing network capacity. Similarly, shared-use arrangements, multifunctional facilities, and adaptive reuse can enable social infrastructure to accommodate changing demands without requiring new construction (Barbaro et al., 2022). These strategies reflect a broader shift from maximizing the lifespan of physical assets to maximizing the service value generated throughout their lifespan. Functional circularity also provides an important bridge between circularity and resilience. It contributes to static resilience when durability, repairability, adaptability, and alternative uses help maintain or rapidly restore critical services during disruption. At the same time, it supports dynamic resilience (DR) when assets and their functions can be reconfigured in response to changing demands, disturbances, or longer-term societal and environmental conditions. Adaptability is therefore particularly important: Aljaber et al. (2024) identify lifecycle thinking and operational flexibility as critical to CE implementation, while Hamida et al. (2025) demonstrate the importance of adaptability for sustaining long-term circular performance. However, regulatory, permitting, and financing arrangements may still favor demolition and replacement over adaptation and reuse (Kummen et al., 2026). For infrastructure, functional circularity therefore concerns more than extending asset life; it seeks to retain, restore, and adapt service value over time. This is particularly important because infrastructure value ultimately depends on how effectively assets continue to meet evolving societal needs (Zuluaga et al., 2025; Bayeroju et al., 2021). Yet adapting individual assets is insufficient when infrastructure services depend on interconnected networks. This leads to the need to consider circularity at the system level, where resources, capacities, and services can be coordinated and reconfigured across infrastructure networks.

Informational circularity

A third, analytically distinct dimension concerns the circulation and retention of asset information and knowledge, rather than materials or functions. Infrastructure assets are planned, inspected, operated, maintained, modified, and rehabilitated over long lifecycles, generating information that must remain usable across lifecycle stages, organizations, and technological environments. From a whole-life perspective, this makes Asset Information Management (AIM) fundamental to circular infrastructure. We define a closed information loop through four properties: continuity across lifecycle stages, interoperability across systems and organizations, traceability of asset provenance, condition, and interventions, and feedback into maintenance, adaptation, reuse, and replacement decisions. It also requires data quality, clear ownership and access rights, and security-minded governance: information must be available to authorized users without exposing sensitive operational data or creating new cyber vulnerabilities. Asset management standards such as ISO 55000 similarly recognize information as a core organizational resource supporting lifecycle decision-making (International Organization for Standardization, 2024). Informational circularity is therefore technology-neutral. Its objective is not the adoption of a particular digital technology, but the preservation and continuous reuse of reliable asset information throughout the infrastructure lifecycle. Advanced tools and technologies (including asset information systems, BIM and GIS environments, sensing and monitoring technologies, material or digital product passports, digital twins, data analytics, and emerging AI-enabled applications) can support AIM by improving information capture, integration, accessibility, traceability, and decision feedback. Their value for circularity consequently depends less on technological sophistication than on whether they prevent information loss and fragmentation and enable knowledge to move across organizational and lifecycle boundaries. For example, material passports can preserve information on provenance, composition, maintenance history, and condition to support verification and potential component reuse (Çetin et al., 2023; Markou et al., 2025), while integrated digital asset information has been associated with whole-life carbon management, predictive maintenance, resilience assessment, and climate adaptation planning (Kaewunruen et al., 2023; Kaewunruen et al., 2025).

Informational circularity is particularly important for dynamic resilience because recovery and adaptation depend on whether information generated before, during, and after disruption can be retained, shared, interpreted, and reintegrated into future decisions. AIM can support this process by maintaining asset histories and condition knowledge, integrating new observations, and feeding lessons from disruptions back into maintenance, rehabilitation, adaptation, and investment decisions. Informational circularity therefore exists when infrastructure knowledge remains accessible, interoperable, traceable, transferable, and reusable across the whole life of the asset and under changing conditions. Information is consequently not merely an enabler of material reuse, but a form of infrastructure value that must itself remain in circulation. Without this continuity, the ability to retain, restore, and reconfigure material, functional, systemic, and institutional value is significantly constrained.

Systemic circularity

Infrastructure circularity should be understood as an emergent property of interconnected systems, rather than the cumulative outcome of isolated asset-level strategies (Coenen et al., 2023). While many CE initiatives focus on optimizing individual assets, circular performance depends on interactions among infrastructure subsystems, stakeholders, resources, and lifecycle stages (Oluleye et al., 2023). The relevant unit of analysis therefore shifts from the individual asset toward the infrastructure network or system-of-systems, where resource exchanges, shared capacities, interdependencies, cascading effects, and displaced environmental impacts become visible. Kaewunruen et al. (2023) similarly argue that uniform CE strategies are unlikely to succeed because “each system will require different CE approaches.” In railway infrastructure, for example, circular performance depends on interactions among tracks, electrification, signaling, rolling stock, and supporting assets rather than optimization of any single component. This perspective is consistent with industrial ecology, where circular value emerges through exchanges of materials, energy, information, and capacity across interconnected organizations and systems (Palagonia, 2025; Ometto et al., 2024).

Systemic circularity is also particularly important to the relationship between circularity and resilience. From a static resilience perspective, interconnected systems can provide redundancy, alternative pathways, resource substitution, and shared capacity that help maintain critical services when individual assets or subsystems are disrupted. From a DR perspective, these connections can enable resources, capacities, and services to be reconfigured during recovery and adaptation. However, greater interconnection does not inherently increase resilience: dependencies that facilitate circular exchanges under normal conditions may also transmit disturbances and create cascading failures across infrastructure networks (Kennedy and Linnenluecke, 2022). Systemic circularity must therefore balance connectivity and resource sharing with diversity, modularity, and sufficient redundancy. Consequently, systemic circularity extends whole-life management beyond optimizing individual assets toward managing how value, resources, capacity, and risk circulate across interconnected infrastructure systems. Transportation, energy, water, and communication networks should therefore be considered not only in terms of their individual circular performance, but also in terms of how their interactions support, or constrain, long-term value retention, service continuity, and adaptive capacity (Ometto et al., 2024). This system-level perspective also creates the need for institutional arrangements capable of coordinating circular decisions across organizational and sectoral boundaries, leading to the final dimension of institutional circularity.

Institutional circularity

The final dimension concerns the institutional relationships through which circular decisions are made, funded, coordinated, governed, and implemented (Hernando et al., 2024). Institutional circularity concerns the rules, decision rights, incentives, funding horizons, and accountability arrangements that enable actors to act across lifecycle boundaries; it is distinct from informational circularity, which concerns the usability of data and knowledge. Kaewunruen et al. (2023) identify governance as one of the principal barriers to circular infrastructure, highlighting “inadequate cooperation among fragmented stakeholders,” “poor inter-relationships among academic, industrial and public sectors,” and “non-inclusive, undiversified policies and funding” as key obstacles to CE implementation in linear infrastructure systems. This view is consistent with a growing body of literature that reframes CE governance through the Triple Helix model, where universities, industry, and government collaborate to co-create innovation, and where governments act as facilitators and coordinators rather than solely as regulators (Espuny et al., 2025). Comparative studies of municipal circular construction strategies further demonstrate that successful circular transitions depend not only on technological innovation but also on governance mechanisms, including procurement policies, regulatory frameworks, financial incentives, stakeholder engagement, and cross-sector partnerships (Marzani et al., 2025; Tolentino-Zondervan and van Winden, 2026). In the context of infrastructure, where ownership, delivery, operation, and regulation are often distributed across multiple public agencies, private organizations, and different levels of government, governance is more than an enabling condition; it is a core dimension of circularity itself. Rom a resilience perspective, institutional circularity is particularly important to DR. Recovery and adaptation depend not only on physical resources and technical capacity, but also on the ability of institutions to retain knowledge, coordinate responsibilities, mobilize resources, revise decisions, and learn from disruption. Institutional continuity allows lessons from previous projects and disturbances to feed back into future planning, procurement, and investment, while adaptive governance enables policies, funding mechanisms, standards, and organizational arrangements to evolve as conditions change. Institutional circularity therefore extends the notion of a closed loop from physical resources to decision-making, coordination, and organizational learning, ensuring that institutional knowledge and capacity are retained and reintegrated into future infrastructure decisions. Achieving circular and resilient infrastructure therefore requires closing institutional loops through coordinated decision-making, aligned funding mechanisms, collaborative procurement, shared standards, organizational learning, and stronger partnerships among academia, industry, and government (Coenen et al., 2023).

Discussion: implications for whole-life infrastructure management

The five-dimensional framework proposed in this paper reframes infrastructure circularity from a predominantly material question into a whole-life value-retention problem. Material and functional circularity remain essential, but they cannot alone capture the performance of long-lived, interconnected infrastructure systems. Informational circularity preserves the knowledge required for lifecycle decisions; systemic circularity shifts the unit of analysis from individual assets to interconnected networks; and institutional circularity retains the governance, coordination, and learning capacity required to sustain circular practices over time. The novelty of the framework therefore lies not in claiming that these individual dimensions are themselves new, but in conceptualizing infrastructure circularity as their interaction around a different object of analysis: the retention and regeneration of multiple forms of value across infrastructure systems and their governance ecosystems. This moves beyond existing approaches that remain predominantly focused on material recovery and asset reuse (Mani et al., 2026) and beyond building-centric interpretations of CE (Hernández, 2025). This reframing also reveals why circularity should be considered together with resilience. Circular strategies may support resilience by retaining resources, extending asset functionality, preserving knowledge, and creating opportunities for resource and capacity sharing; however, circularity does not inherently produce resilient systems. Efficiency-oriented strategies can reduce redundancy and spare capacity, while increasing interdependencies may introduce new vulnerabilities and cascading risks (Kennedy and Linnenluecke, 2022).

As illustrated in Figure 1, the five dimensions contribute differently but jointly to static resilience and dynamic resilience. Material and functional circularity predominantly support SR by retaining physical resources and critical services, whereas informational, systemic, and institutional circularity become increasingly important to DR through recovery, reconfiguration, coordination, learning, and adaptation. These relationships are not exclusive: functional adaptability and systemic redundancy, for example, can contribute to both forms of resilience. Resilience is therefore not proposed as a sixth dimension of circularity, but as a cross-cutting stress test of whether retained value remains accessible and can be mobilized and reconfigured when infrastructure systems are disrupted.

For infrastructure management, this perspective changes the question from how efficiently individual material loops are closed to how effectively multiple forms of value are retained across the whole infrastructure lifecycle, under both normal and disrupted conditions. This has implications for assessment and decision-making. A system may perform strongly in one dimension while remaining weak in another: high material recovery may coexist with poor asset utilization; extensive information collection may coexist with weak institutional learning; and highly interconnected resource networks may improve circular efficiency while increasing systemic vulnerability. Circular performance should therefore be assessed as a configuration of interacting dimensions rather than the maximization of any single dimension. A circular intervention should therefore be evaluated against whole-life service, safety, environmental, social, and resilience outcomes, including burden shifting and trade-offs, rather than a material-flow indicator alone (International Organization for Standardization, 2024). This proposition opens a broader research agenda. Future research should examine whether the five dimensions are empirically distinguishable, how their relative importance and interactions vary across infrastructure sectors and lifecycle stages, and which configurations simultaneously support circularity, static resilience, and dynamic resilience. Particular attention is needed to the trade-offs between resource efficiency and redundancy, connectivity and cascading risk, life extension and adaptation, and short-term service continuity and long-term transformation. Developing indicators capable of capturing material, functional, informational, systemic, and institutional value would provide infrastructure owners, operators, and policymakers with a more comprehensive basis for whole-life planning and decision-making. Ultimately, the transition toward circular infrastructure requires moving from material loops to resilient infrastructure systems. The relevant question is no longer only whether materials remain in circulation, but whether infrastructure systems can retain, mobilize, reconfigure, and regenerate material, functional, informational, systemic, and institutional value throughout their whole life; including under disruption. This shift provides a basis for integrating circular economy principles with whole-life infrastructure management while preserving the robustness, adaptability, and learning capacity required for future infrastructure systems.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Assed N. Haddad, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Reviewed by: Yifei Yu, University of Twente, Netherlands