Sustainable Business Models Incorporating Circular Economy Principles: Transitioning from Waste to Wealth Platforms

Waste-to-wealth (W2W) platforms are socio-technical systems that convert heterogeneous waste streams into secondary materials, energy carriers, and verifiable environmental attributes, enabling circular value creation beyond conventional waste management. Drawing on dynamic capabilities and resource orchestration, this chapter explains how organisations assemble, deploy, and reconfigure distributed resources, material flows, data infrastructures, specialised knowledge, and institutional legitimacy to drive W2W-enabled circular business model innovation. By integrating sustainable transitions, industrial ecology, and technology management, this chapter highlights how artificial intelligence, IoT-enabled traceability, distributed ledger technologies, and process automation enhance scalability, transparency, and coordination across circular value chains. These technologies also expand monetisation pathways such as secondary material marketplaces and auditable carbon-related claims, while raising governance challenges regarding data access and appropriation. Therefore, this chapter examines partnership and governance arrangements—policy instruments, standards, assurance routines, and shared digital infrastructures—that reduce transaction costs, align incentives, and sustain credibility across stakeholders. Building on these insights, this chapter develops a conceptual framework linking technological affordances, dynamic capabilities, and multilevel orchestration to the embedding of W2W principles in sustainable business models under competitive decarbonisation pressures.