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Abstract The transition from linear to circular material flows has become a priority across industries. However, Circular Economy (CE) transitions remain fragmented. Research and practice often emphasize isolated aspects such as business models or production processes, without considering systemic interactions that shape and determine long-term sustainability and profitability. This paper conducts a strategic scoping review to advance a system-level perspective on CE implementations. It proposes a novel Circular System (CS) framework that integrates circular production, manufacturing, and business-model literature into a multi-level conceptual framework for understanding system-level dependencies relevant to engineering implementations, especially related to CE. Drawing on socio-technical transition theory and engineering design the findings show how these domains overlap, reinforce, or conflict across the micro, meso, and macro levels. The CS framework clarifies the linkages between technological innovations, organizational change, financing, and policy that enable or hinder circular transformation. The analytical utility of the CS framework is demonstrated through a satellite reuse case, which reveals systemic lock-ins that prevent circularity in a high-tech industry. Findings highlight that circularity is most effective operationalized through coordinated design choices, industrial capabilities, financial incentives, and policy conditions across all system levels. Applied to satellite reusability, the framework identifies where circular strategies break down and highlights leverage points that can support sustainability and competitiveness, moving the CE beyond isolated practices toward an actionable pathway for industrial and societal transformation.
Weiss et al. (Sun,) studied this question.