An official website of the United States government
Abstract Drawing on research with food waste recycling facilities in New England, this paper explores a fundamental tension between the eco-modernist logics of the circular economy and the reality of contemporary waste streams. Composting and digestion are promoted as key solutions to food waste, due to their ability to return nutrients to agricultural soils. However, our work suggests that food waste processors increasingly find themselves responsible for policing boundaries between distinct “material” and “biological” systems as imagined by the architects of the circular economy—boundaries penetrable by toxicants. This responsibility creates significant problems for processors due to the regulatory, educational, and structural barriers documented in this research. This paper contributes to scholarship which suggests the need to rethink the modernist logics of the circular economy and to recognize the realities of entangled material and biological systems. More specifically, we argue that if circularity is the goal, policy needs to recognize the barriers food waste processors face and concentrate circularity efforts further upstream to ensure fair, just, and safe circular food systems.
more »
« less
Is Convergence Around The Circular Economy Necessary? Exploring the Productivity of Divergence in US Circular Economy Discourse and Practice
Amid the growth of circular economy research, policy, and practice, there are increasingly loud calls for a unified and singular definition of circularity. This unity is needed, proponents argue, to enable swift action in the face of climate and environmental crises. Our work interrogates the ideal of convergence around the circular economy. We ask whether circularity must be singular and uniform in order to be effective. Based on convergence science research and social theory rooted in ideas of divergence, our paper draws on observations of a convergence science workshop, focus groups, interviews, and questionnaires with US-based circular economy professionals to explore shared and divergent understandings and practices of circularity. We find that even among a relatively homogeneous group of research participants (in terms of race, class, and education), there is significant divergence in terms of both practices and perceptions of circular economy principles. We focus in this paper on how research participants understand innovation in the circular economy as just one potential illustration of divergent circularity. Our research contributes to an understanding of circular economy knowledge politics, illuminating how circularity is contested even among those who advocate most strongly for its implementation. We ultimately find opportunity and promise precisely in the spaces of contestation, and see divergence as a way to hold space for multiple ways of being and relating to economies, materials, and beings. These more inclusive pathways, we argue, may be necessary to ensure just and effective transitions to more circular economic forms.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1934426
- PAR ID:
- 10357408
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Circular Economy and Sustainability
- ISSN:
- 2730-597X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Converging environmental crises have inspired a movement to shift dominant economic forms away from linear “take-make-waste” models and toward more circular forms that reimagine discarded materials as valuable resources. With the coming “end of cheap nature”, this invitation to reimagine waste as something more than “the political other of capitalist value” is seen as both an environmental necessity and an opportunity for green growth. Less often discussed is that the circular economy, in its reconfiguration of value, also has the potential to reshape contemporary property relations and dismantle existing forms of circularity. In this paper, we explore potential shifts in property relations through an analysis of three strategies often imagined as key to facilitating the transition to circularity—extended producer responsibility, repair, and online resale. Each case synthesizes existing research, public discourse, and findings from a series of focus groups and interviews with circular economy professionals. While this research is preliminary and demands additional research, all three cases suggest caution given the possibility that some circular economy strategies can concentrate value and control of existing materials stocks, dispossess those most vulnerable, and alienate participants in existing reuse, recycling, and repair markets. Drawing on and adapting Luxemburg's concept of primitive accumulation, Tsing's ideas about salvage accumulation, Moore's work on commodity frontiers and recent research which encourages more attention to processes of commoning—we argue that without careful attention to relations of power and justice in conceptualizations of ownership and the collective actions necessary to transform our economic formsin common, transitions toward the circular economy have the potential to enclose the value of discards and exacerbate inequality.more » « less
-
The circular economy (CE) seeks to maintain products and materials at their highest utility and value. The organisational and governmental policy have seised onto the CE philosophy to advance socio-economic and environmental development. CE remains an essentially contested concept – making its utilisation as a foundation for managerial and policy decisions challenging. Circularity assessment has not been systematically adopted, especially within supply chain management. Using critical scholarly and practical evidential foundation, we proposed a comprehensive set of metrics that can be utilised in supplier selection, monitoring, and development for circularity. These metrics include the macro, meso, and micro levels. A group decision-making method integrating best-worst method (BWM), regret theory (RT), and dual hesitant fuzzy sets (DHFS) for circular economy and circularity (CEC) supplier evaluation and selection is introduced – providing instrumental value for the identified metrics typology. The proposed BWM-DHFE-RT integrative analytical method can accommodate decisionmaker psychological behavior under uncertainty while simultaneously capturing divergent or conflicting opinions of different decision-makers. An illustrative business scenario is utilized to demonstrate the application of the proposed method. Though the proposed CE performance metrics and methodology are used for CEC supplier management reasons they have broader applicability. Future research and application directions are discussed.more » « less
-
ircular economies are often framed as addressing a trio of problems: environmental degradation, economic stagnation, and social ills, broadly defined. Our paper centers on this last claim – that circular economies promise social benefits. There is a dearth of literature focused on the social dimensions of circular economies (Geissdoerfer, Martin, Paulo Savaget, Nancy M. P. Bocken, and Erik Jan Hultink. 2017. “The Circular Economy – A New Sustainability Paradigm?” Journal of Cleaner Production 143 (February): 757–768. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.12.048.), and even less attention to the meaning of social justice in the context of circular economies, let alone how it might be enacted in policy and practice. Drawing on data generated from focus groups with circular economy experts and a content analysis of US-based governmental, NGO, and business literature on circular economies, we explore whether and how justice emerges in circular economy discourse. We explore the narratives that these actors use to describe justice, and the barriers they see in achieving just and inclusive circular economies. We aim to identify the ways in which social justice is defined and discussed – or not – by the actors who seem to be most actively pushing for a circular economy (CE). Our work addresses the critical need to articulate clearly what it is we mean by social justice in relation to the CE. For if the CE is to contribute to sustainable social transformations, justice must be more than a buzzword – the CE must be just by design.more » « less
-
Increasingly, circularity indicators for material, energy, and water systems guide circular economy design. While indicators for products made from recycled carbon-based materials are somewhat common, peer indicators for waste nitrogen-derived products are limited. It is important, however, to develop such indicators to guide emerging technologies that transform waste nitrogen into products. In this study, we summarize the nitrogen circularity indicator literature, emphasizing the agricultural and wastewater sectors. Next, we use the Material Circularity Indicator (MCI) developed by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, to quantify the circularity of products made from waste nitrogen in swine manure. We considered four test cases using different technologies to recover nitrogen from the manure. Our analysis indicates that technologies that seem to increase circularity on the surface may not yield a substantial increase in MCI results. Finally, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of using the MCI for product-level analysis and further developments.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s43615-022-00199-1
