What policies and practices are needed to help mitigate, address and combat the emerging societal challenges of today, such as high levels of resource extraction, impending climate change and unsustainable waste management? The circular economy has risen in attention over the past years, framed as an all-encompassing approach to address these challenges, focusing on closing, slow and narrowing material and energy loops. Many policies and business activities claim to be new and circular responding to the increasing buzz over the topic in policy and business circles. This study argues for the need to place the circular economy in a longer historical context of policies and practices and seeks to draw lessons from these past experiences. Bringing together insights from environmental governance and industrial ecology scholarship, this study follows a multimethod approach through exploring and examining the effectiveness of the policy instrument extended producer responsibility, an approach developed in the 1990s that moved the responsibility for a waste product to producers. It analyses the governance and policy lessons of these systems, both retrospectively and from the contemporary demands of the circular economy. Drawing on case study insights from the Netherlands, Italy and France, it sheds light on the complex and interrelated actor and policy structures that have emerged under the umbrella of extended producer responsibility in the European Union and provides tangible and concrete insights on how to improve and transform these systems.