July 2026
True Profits Case Study: Oscar Circulair
“Our goal is to transform the waste industry and prove that you can build a highly
commercial profitable company with significant benefits for society. But there are rules
that get in the way of whether you can grow as fast as a conventional business, and
that needs to be addressed.”
Jan Willem van Bokhorst, Co-founder and Chief Value Oscar, Oscar Circulair
The True Profits Initiative is striving to make impact driven business models the most profitable and most competitive in the market. Across sectors, businesses are proving that reducing negative externalities and creating societal value can co-exist with strong commercial performance. To achieve this at scale, it is essential to close the existing Profitability Gap impact driven businesses face. Currently, market conditions do not reward solutions that reduce negative externalities or create societal value through financial returns. In turn this limits these impactful business models ability to scale. Closing the Profitability Gap requires a combination of business model innovation and market incentives that make impact profitable. This case study explores how Oscar Circulair, a circular waste collector is closing the gap, examining how the company is managing to bring together the commercial business success with environmental and social impact.
How Oscar Circulair is Closing the Gap
To narrow this gap, Oscar redesigned its pricing model so that businesses pay less the more effectively they separate their waste and the less waste they generate overall, making residual waste the most expensive stream and giving businesses a direct financial incentive to improve. Their personal face-to-face collection model also creates regular engagement between collectors and business owners, helping clients learn better waste practices over time. Existing regulations also support this approach, since zero-emission zones, canal weight restrictions, and Amsterdam’s rules against leaving containers on the street favour Oscar’s lighter, indoor collection model.
What is Needed to Scale?
Even so, structural barriers remain to closing the Profitability Gap. Labour is taxed more heavily than virgin materials, even though circular systems depend heavily on labour-intensive work like sorting and quality control. Additionally the absence of mandatory recycled-content requirements lets virgin materials compete at a cheaper price than recycled ones. This means it often remains cheaper for businesses to simply incinerate waste than to recycle it.
The case study concludes that closing the gap fully will require shifting the rules of the market beyond business model innovation. This includes tax reform, such as taxing virgin materials to level the playing field between virgin and recycled materials. Oscar’s experience demonstrates that environmental and social impact can be commercially viable. But also shows that market and policy conditions still need to catch up.
