The realization of a fully circular economy has become a crucial aspect of the European Union’s climate aspirations. In this regard, end-of-life product recovery and recycling play a critical role in preserving the economic value embedded in products. Effective information sharing between product manufacturers and recyclers is therefore necessary for identifying existing pain points and opportunities for improving the product design and recovery processes with respect to circularity. However, the common motivations and information needs for establishing collaborations between the aforementioned stakeholders are currently unclear. To this end, we present the methodology and results from a survey-based study performed in the EU-funded CircThread project that investigated (1) common motivations to foster collaboration between recyclers and product manufacturers and (2) desired production information exchange between these stakeholders with regards to product end-of-life disassembly. Two separate survey designs were distributed among five recyclers and five product manufacturers to address the above questions. Results show that the main motivation for seeking collaborations was to enable product manufacturers to decrease costs and for recyclers to establish a new source of revenue. However, the lack of product lifecycle information and information-sharing structures poses a significant challenge toward fostering profitable collaborations. The paper ends with a discussion on how the EU CircThread platform and the design of Digital Product Passports could overcome the identified information gaps and reduce the barriers for industrial circular transition.