What Circular Rewards is built to draw out the revenue recovered from circularity and help offset the costs : by increasing a Brand's financial return from its existing garments through per-item data, and by making it easier for Brands to form direct partnerships with Downstream providers who use GCN's app and RFID readers — so both sides benefit from the same system.

Circular Rewards is a voluntary payment layer built into the GCN platform — entirely separate from government Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes; GCN doesn't collect EPR fees itself. Instead, Circular Rewards rewards every business that keeps a product moving through the circular economy: brands earn a return on the circular design choices they've already made, and the downstream businesses who resell, rent, repair, redesign, and reuse those products are rewarded for the real work and cost involved in doing it. It's a way to recognise and reward circularity, creativity, and product longevity across the whole network.

How it works

Every resale, rental, repair, redesign, and reuse creates a verified event in a product's GCN Digital Product Passport (DPP). Three of those event types drive a financial exchange across the network — sometimes rewarding the brand, sometimes rewarding the downstream operator — reflecting the real value created each time a product stays in circulation instead of going to landfill or skipping EPR and going straight to recycling.

Circular Design Rewards — rewarding brands for circular design increasing ROI
Downstream business → Brand. Triggered by a verified resale, rental, reuse or redesign event. 

When a product is resold, rented, or redesigned, the downstream operator pays the brand a share of that transaction — a direct return on the sustainability, durability, repairability, and circularity choices already captured as Circular Performance data in the product's GCN DPP. Repair sits outside this: it's a direct relationship between the owner and the repairer, who is paid for their own time and skill, not a resale event.

EPR Reward - Transport Offset — rewarding downstream operators
Brand → downstream provider. Applies to all five pathways, including repair. Funds the transport and logistics of diverting by-product resources to sorters and recyclers. Repairers scan for free as their service to brands, and can separately opt in to a Diversion Reward for their own scrap. 

Moving a product through resale, rental, repair, or redesign often carries real transport costs — costs that fall hardest on small operators, and that can be the difference between a product staying in circulation or being sent to landfill. When a product moves between two registered downstream businesses, GCN calculates a transport-cost contribution based on the product's weight and invites the brand to help cover it — rewarding the operators doing the physical work of keeping products moving.

Recycling Contribution — rewarding recyclers, and giving brands proof
Brand → recyclers, remanufacturers who provide the end-of-life evidence.

When a product reaches a recycler, their intake scan notifies the brand that its product has entered the end-of-life recycling stream. The brand can then choose to contribute directly toward the cost of recycling its own product, and receives a record of that contribution in return — the weight, the date, and the recycler — so it can point to real evidence that it helped fund the recycling of what it made. A stronger, fully certified content-traceability option is also in development for brands who want it, offered wherever a recycling partner is able to support it.

Enquire about the Circular Rewards Program

Plus explore Circular Metrics and Circular Stories