Summer is the season for reading, and three summers running we've pulled together a circular economy list worth your downtime. Here are four new picks for 2026. You'll find a 700-page material history, a Patagonia memoir, and a 1960 classic that named planned obsolescence before most of us were born. Each one connects back to the same idea: keeping good assets in use and out of the landfill.
Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and metal. Conway tells the story of modern civilization through the six raw materials that build it, traveling from the deepest mine in Europe to the chip factories of Taiwan.
Conway's point is hard to unsee once you've read it. New material is expensive to source, and it's getting more expensive. The asset you're about to idle is almost always cheaper to remarket than its replacement is to build.
The book that named Planned Obsolescence.
Packard saw it in 1960: products built with a death date, designed to wear out and get replaced. His warning about throwaway culture wasn't limited to consumer goods. It applies just as directly to capital equipment.
Planned obsolescence built the surplus problem. Now, sixty-five years later, planned disposition solves it by choosing recovery over scrap.
The Patagonia founder's memoir, and the best argument on this list that circular thinking is good business and not just good ethics. Circularity used to sound like a sacrifice. Chouinard shows it's a strategy. Proved durability sells.
Patagonia's whole model rests on a simple premise: a working asset has value worth recovering. That's the difference between remarketing and scrapping, in any industry.
This is the book to hand the skeptic who believes sustainability and profit don't mix.
In this book, Raworth rethinks economic growth from the ground up, arguing for a model that meets human needs without exhausting the planet. She argues growth shouldn't mean extraction at all costs.
Her case is for value retained over value wasted, and recovering an asset instead of scrapping it is a sound capital discipline, not a loss you absorb.
None of these books were written specifically about surplus assets. That's what makes them useful. They all land on the same problem: the decision to retire an asset rarely gets made on the asset's condition. It gets made on a calendar, a budget cycle, or a program ending.
A biopharma company retires a bioreactor after a program ends and the equipment still has fifteen good years in it. An automotive plant retools a line, and the press that came out is exactly what a supplier three states over has been sourcing for eight months. An energy operation decommissions a site, and the transformers go to scrap because nobody costed out the alternative. An FMCG packaging line comes out at the end of a lease, and the receiving warehouse has no plan for it. A ground support fleet ages out at one airport and gets bought used at another. Industrial manufacturers sit on idle machine tools that hold value better than almost anything else on the books.
Same decision, six different rooms. The books explain the why. Liquidity Services is ready to help you execute the how.
We've made this an annual tradition. Catch up on our previous circular economy summer reading lists.
Four books exploring resilience, systems thinking, and the future of the circular economy.
Read the 2025 list →The original collection that inspired our annual tradition—five essential books on the circular economy.
Read the 2024 list →