Repair of mobile phones fits with the vision of a circular economy in an urban context and with the Sustainable Development Goal 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities. Drawing on the literature about firm level competitiveness and closed-loop design through repair, remanufacturing or recycling, we analyze the business ecosystem of independent mobile phone repair shops in the Netherlands, Poland and China as a glocal business activity. The analysis is based on primary data collection through a questionnaire to independent repair shops in the Netherlands (n = 130), Poland (n = 443) and China (n = 175) with response rates of 13%, 12%, 40%, respectively; and 17 interviews in the Netherlands, 40 in Poland, and 70 in China. Findings indicate that to maintain a strong position in the local market and to sustain the trust of customers, independent mobile phone repair shops offer a range of customized services based on direct contact with customers. In China, the increasing prices of spare parts and falling prices of mobile phones constitute the most important challenges, whereas in the Netherlands and Poland, the most important challenges are the competitive pressures from informal repair activities, and new repair shops. Our research also revealed that repairability strongly depends on the global manufacturers’ circularity choices.

In this article, we highlight the pressing need for integrating the windows of opportunities that digital transformation of education opens up with circular economy education to accelerate the achievements of sustainability outcomes. Circular economy transition, as a multi-scalar process, relates to several contexts, e.g., product, firm, industry-level transformations ranging from designing local socio-technical solutions to greening global value chains, with multi-level policy and business implications for finance, production, distribution, consumption that are fundamentally consequential to everyday life, work and learning. Drawing on theories of neo-capital, multi-level perspective and structuration, and as methodology, using content analysis and qualitative meta-synthesis of scientific publications in digital education for sustainability, we blended our findings into multi-level, multi-domain structuration blueprints, which capture the complexity of value emanating from the interactions among external structures, internal structures of agents, active agencies and outcomes, for circular economy open online education and massive open online course instructional designs. We conclude that learning and creating multiple values to increase social–ecological value, complementarily to economic value, necessitate activating the complexity of value embedded in digital education and circular economy transitions with customizable niches of learning preferences and journeys of individuals and groups, within broader (and evolving) technological, organizational and institutional structures.