Circular transition path for Snickers Workwear
A prioritised route to circularity for a 5 million garment business
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Close-up of a construction worker kneeling in Snickers Workwear trousers with a KneeGuard patch
- Client
- Hultafors Group / Snickers Workwear
- Context
- Design for Circular Economy, DTU
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- Joint contribution
- Team size
- 5
- Tools
- Ready2LOOP readiness assessment · CE business model configurator · Circular Economy scanner · Life cycle and value chain mapping · Smart circularity framework · Transition planning
- Contribution
- Team of 5, worked jointly throughout on the transition plan
Snickers Workwear makes over 5 million garments a year, mostly for construction, and one worn part usually means that the whole garment is thrown out. We ran a structured accelerator programme with them and came back with two prioritised initiatives.
The problem
Their products get very hard use, and the pockets especially wear out from carrying screws, which means that when one component fails the garment gets discarded even though the rest of it is still fine. This makes the life cycle linear and it ends in landfill or combustion. It is important to note that Snickers is already committed to durability and has run recycling pilots, however material complexity and customer awareness are still in the way.
How we worked
The programme ran through a series of tools, including product life cycle and value chain mapping, a Circular Economy scanner covering 32 circular opportunities, the Ready2LOOP readiness assessment across eight dimensions, a circular business model configurator, a smart circularity framework, and finally a transition plan. Here we supported the company's own people while they filled in the readiness assessment rather than doing it for them, and this brought out a lot of reflection and argument that we would not have got otherwise.
How we decided what to prioritise
We scored the dimensions on three criteria that we set ourselves, being economic and technological feasibility, impact versus effort, and how innovative each one was, and we then put timing on them, where now is 0 to 2 years, soon is 3 to 5 and later is 6 to 10. This scale was chosen due to the size of the organisation, since a large company does not move on a shorter one. Two dimensions came out on top, being Product and Service Innovation, and Use, Support and Maintenance.
What we recommended
Modular design, so that the parts which wear out first can be replaced instead of the whole garment, and this also allows components to be customised for specific tasks. Furthermore we recommended a maintenance service covering washing and repair, piloted through the companies whose workers already wear the products, so that the workwear can be collected and returned on a routine, and partnered with someone better at logistics in order to keep the barrier to entry low. This means that a take back programme becomes much easier to add later, since the collection route already exists.
Being honest about the tools
It is important to note that the business model configurator depends a lot on how you interpret it and gives general guidance rather than anything specific to the industry. Furthermore the readiness assessment was only filled in by two people inside the company, so there is a limit to how much can be read into the score, and Snickers currently only has two stakeholders in their value chain, which seems to limit how quickly any of this can move.