Implementing the circular economy (CE) in the plastic packaging sector is considered a crucial step towards the adoption of more sustainable practices. However, despite the presence of regulatory CE targets, the plastic packaging sector's transition is not speeding up sufficiently to reach them.Individual companies need to reconfigure their resource base and develop complementary resources and capabilities to improve the systems performance. Based on the resource-based view, this study identifies and prioritizes the most important resources and capabilities for a circular transition along the plastic packaging supply chain. Accordingly, expert opinion was analyzed using a combination of a real-time Delphi method and an analytic hierarchy process. Two aspects were of utmost importance for the experts: collaboration capabilities between upstream and downstream actors, and design capabilities that create simpler and recyclable products. When prioritizing resources and capabilities, potential conflicts between reactive and proactive CE strategies were found. Further research is proposed to (i) develop adequate framework conditions to enable higher waste management targets, (ii) apply dynamic, natural and extended resource-based views to better understand the effects of collaboration networks in CE and their dynamics, and (iii) investigate supply chain power relationships to understand the impacts of supply chain transformations.