- With French Tech start-up CircularPlace, Orange is testing a solution to help companies better manage their unused IT equipment, enhancing value, strengthening traceability, and streamlining the circular economy.
- This collaboration also demonstrates how Orange works with start-ups to transform operational challenges faced by businesses into tangible services.
Every year, thousands of professional IT devices remain underutilized or stored, despite holding economic value and being suitable for refurbishment, resale, donation, or recycling. Computers, servers, Wi-Fi access points, or network hardware retain value, but often remain stored due to the lack of a simple, clear process. This operational challenge comes with clear objectives: prevent unnecessary storage, maximize the value of existing assets, and make tangible progress on responsibility commitments.
To address this need, Orange acts as a trusted third party and integrator between client companies and reuse stakeholders. It leverages its understanding of business challenges and its ability to bring together partners within the same value chain to make the process simpler and more reliable.
Founded in 2021, CircularPlace has developed a platform dedicated to the valorization and traceability of professional equipment. It helps companies identify their assets, maintain an up-to-date inventory, manage maintenance and repair requests. When equipment is no longer used internally, CircularPlace directs it to the most relevant channel—whether transferring between sites of the same company, selling to employees, reselling for refurbishment and reuse, donating, or recycling.
As Noémi Smadja, Chief Sustainability Officer of Orange Business, points out: "Our clients expect solutions that address their business challenges while helping them advance their responsibility commitments. With CircularPlace, we are exploring an approach that combines innovation, value creation, and responsibility, while laying the foundations for a trusted ecosystem among companies, partners, and actors along the value chain."
This collaboration is part of the initiative presented by Orange at VivaTech to accelerate market access for French start-ups and scale-ups. By integrating innovative solutions into its B2B offerings and services, Orange aims to promote the adoption of trusted French technologies that meet concrete needs.
Orange and CircularPlace are working together through the joint initiative, REvalueIT. The goal is to provide a unified platform that streamlines the responsible handling and valorization of end-of-life IT equipment by connecting companies with certified partners.
For companies, the immediate benefit is having a single entry point to better manage equipment that might otherwise remain stored or poorly valued. For reuse stakeholders, it provides easier access to assets for refurbishment and resale. And for the entire ecosystem, it ensures smoother circulation of equipment and a more transparent valorization process.
REvalueIT exemplifies what can be achieved when a specialized start-up and a trusted large group collaboration – a concrete, useful solution designed for the daily application of large-scale circular economy practices.
Providing a customer perspective, Emmanuel E. CASTRO, Head of Local Operations France at FAYAT IT, adds: "Managing unused IT equipment is a real issue, but often difficult to handle simply and structurally at the company level. The advantage of an initiative like this is to better valorize equipment, gain clarity on their future, and move forward more confidently on our responsibility commitments. Easy to use and intuitive, the REvalueIT platform fully meets our needs”
For CircularPlace, this collaboration with Orange is a catalyst. It provides an opportunity to test its solution against specific customer expectations, within a demanding framework, and to scale up its deployment. The start-up provides the technology and management logic; Orange offers customer relationships, a trusted environment, and the capacity to coordinate different actors in the chain.
"We created CircularPlace to help companies move away from a reactive management approach for unused equipment. With Orange, we share the idea that reuse and valorization should be much simpler, more traceable, and accessible at scale. It’s this ability to turn constraints into opportunities that makes our collaboration meaningful," explains Vincent Rigal, CEO of CircularPlace.
With CircularPlace, Orange is exploring a highly operational way to integrate the circular economy into corporate IT practices, while facilitating access to the market for French innovation.