For roughly 120 years, music lovers liked to own what they listened to. We bought vinyl records, four-track cartridges, tapes, CDs, and so on, and stacked them pedantically in our living rooms. We wanted our tunes close and available, and the physicality of the sleeves and minutiae of the liner notes was part of the experience. Until one day it wasn’t. Though vinyl continues to have a niche, in 2017 many of us make do with Spotify, or a similar subscription service. It’s the same with movies and TV. Nobody in their right mind would buy hundreds of DVDs or Blu-ray discs now, especially at $20 a pop. Netflix does much the same job, and if it doesn’t, we can call on any number of other on-demand services.

“The company that maintains ownership of a product is in the best position to maintain and reuse it.”

You can see this process of dematerialization in lots of areas of life. We store files in the cloud rather than on a computer. We take Ubers and Zipcars instead of buying cars (millennials are purchasing cars at a lower rate than previous generations, though the trend has been somewhat overstated). All sorts of products are becoming services, particularly in the business-to-business world. You can lease office carpets by the month, rather than buying them by the yard. You can rent lighting as a service (from Dutch giant Phillips). You can get tires by the kilometer (from Michelin). Or printing by the page. And on the consumer side, it’s now possible to rent clothes, bikes by the minute (like Citi Bike), washing machines, and nightly food kits (to name a few examples). These are all services that once were sold primarily as products.

There are some things that probably will always be sold for ownership because turning them into services doesn’t make economic sense. But it’s possible that more and more stuff will become services in the future, with huge implications both for business and the environment. The product-as-service model is one of the key ways we might move from a predominantly “take-make-dispose” type of economy (that is, take raw materials, make something, and throw it away when it no longer works, or is no longer fashionable) to an economy that’s more circular or regenerative. Companies will retain ownership of their products, maintaining them and remanufacturing them, extending life cycles, and reducing the world’s gargantuan waste pile. On a planet of finite resources, and in an age of increased expectations around experience, services are likely to make increasing sense in category after category.

“It’s not necessarily possible now, but you can imagine in 5 or 10 years where technology has enabled vast swathes of products to be offered as a service,” says Peter Lacy, global managing director for sustainability services at Accenture, a consultancy firm. “In some cases, the actual ownership structure won’t change, but the stewardship of natural resources through global value chains will function in a different way.”

Technology like the so-called internet of things put sensors on everything, allowing companies to track usage, measure performance, and investigate new business models. GPS enables Zipcar to manage floating car pools and for car companies to introduce “mobility services” (such as General Motors’s Maven, BMW’s ReachNow, or Daimler’s Car2go). Apps let cities like Helsinki integrate transit, bike, and car rental options, raising the possibility that car ownership in congested urban centers will become a thing of the past. Modular design techniques allow products to be made in pieces, so that defective parts can be swapped out and in again without scrapping the whole item.

The shift to services changes the environmental calculus for companies, as Lacy discusses in Waste to Wealth, a book he wrote with Jakob Rutqvist, an Accenture colleague. For one thing, manufacturers and customers have a better alignment of interests. Whereas in the past, companies might have employed a planned obsolescence, hoping that their product would break down eventually, so we would buy a new version, with product-to-service they now have an incentive for the product to last as long possible. Their greatest cost is to send out a technician to maintain something, or to replace it entirely. They also have an incentive to use higher-grade materials, to engineer for longevity and reusability, or to design something so it can be taken apart and repurposed, rather than thrown into a landfill.

Desso, a Dutch flooring company, offers a carpet-leasing service. It takes care of installation, maintaining carpets over their lifetimes, and removes its product when customers no longer want them. At which point, it strips out the carpet fibers (it also takes in its competitors’ products), reconditioning the old fibers into new material and converting the carpet backing into roof and road materials. “The company that maintains ownership of a product is in the best position to maintain and reuse it,” says Joe Iles, an editor at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a U.K. nonprofit focused on the circular economy. “As a rule of thumb, the inner loop of [the value chain] is where the most value is created, both environmental and economic.”