Currently, a range of industries is undergoing a major competitive shift away from unsustainable, energy and resource intensive high-tech to more resource efficient greentech products as a source of competitive advantage. This sustainability turn (although still sluggish in the automobile sector) will force the whole value chain, including small and medium sized suppliers, to diversify as the manufacturing of electric cars will need much less capacity and labour than the production of the combustion engine did and parts can increasingly be printed on demand using 3D printers. At the same time, this shift is characterized by inconsistencies that render this endeavour a particularly difficult one. Wind turbine and electric car manufacturers (considered the core sustainability transition industries), for instance, rely heavily on rare earth elements (Chen and Zheng, 2019) although these elements are at the same time highly risky ecologically due to the extraction of radioactive byproducts, emissions and high energy usage (Pell et al 2019). Therefore, the global sourcing of these sustainability transition industries (Markard, et al. 2012) is highly unsustainable. Although materials are central to the transition to more sustainable economies, the circularity implications of materials are currently often omitted from the discussion especially as regards design (Peck 2012). Complex materials (Fraunhofer Materials 2016) like plastics compounds used in a wide range of products from automobile parts to multi-layer packages pose particularly severe problems at the end of the use phase of products though. A higher sustainability level at the beginning of the value chain is therefore offset by a lower sustainability level at the end (due to highly complex waste streams) – hampering prolonged product usage and Recycling. Here is where an important role accrues to digitization and standardization in the transformation to sustainable value chains. The paper analyzes the sketched role of digitization and standardization on the materials/technology level and makes reference to the approach of technological innovation systems (Malhotra et al., 2019, Markard et al. 2012). On a practical level, materials recovered from end-of-life vehicles and post-consumer plastics waste serve as illustrative examples. Based on this, preliminary management implications (derived from the conceptual analysis and to be complemented by an empirical analysis in the mentioned sectors) are formulated for knowledge-based sustainable value chains in traditional industries „going circular”.