The European rail infrastructure industries are incited to rethink their supply chain to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 (European Green Deal). This leads them to undertake a paradigm shift from a linear to a circular economy based on reusing and recycling materials.

However, industries may be reluctant to invest in new circular models when they lack in estimating the potential benefits and costs of the new circular businesses. Nevertheless, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation argues that a circular economy develops new and strategic opportunities and generates benefits if well thought out. This paper analyses the economic impact of moving from a linear to a circular economy, focusing on the ballast reuse for rail regeneration projects for the case of SNCF Réseau. We propose a multistakeholder activity-based costing approach and apply it to three ballast supply scenarios.

The results show that reusing ballast generates winners and losers. While it can be economically attractive for a project to reuse its ballast, it becomes more complex to determine the profitability of reusing ballast for sharing between different project sites; additional parameters should be considered, such as the distance between sites or to ballast pits as well as other environmental costs. The paper thus argues that circularity does not always equate to sustainability. The deployment of a circular economy should require a systemic vision that not only allows one to pilot a project but also to map and interact with its industrial environment.