What the Circular Economy Leaves Outside the Circle

The circle is a deceptively calm shape, suggesting closure, continuity and balance in a world in which nothing is ultimately lost, because waste returns as resource, products reappear as materials and economic activity is imagined as continuing without exceeding planetary limits. It is hardly surprising that this image has become one of the most powerful promises of contemporary environmental policy, appearing in strategy papers, company reports, product designs and waste management plans as a wishful alternative to the visible destructiveness of taking, making and disposing. Yet the longer I work on waste and recycling infrastructures, the more I remain puzzled by the persistent tendency of circular economy (CE) approaches to privilege the movement of materials while leaving the social, ethical and political relations that enable this movement analytically peripheral.

A recent discussion at a conference (EASA) brought this unease back to me, when I served as a discussant for “The Ethics of Circularity”, a panel convened by Justin Lau and Hoang Ngọc Yến Le, and found myself thinking once again about what anthropology might contribute to current circular economy approaches and to the practical work of those designing, implementing or evaluating them. My concern is not that circular economy approaches are unnecessary, nor that the attempt to reduce waste and resource extraction is somehow misplaced,

but that the circle, especially when it is presented as a coherent technical system, conceals many of the relations, histories and forms of labour that allow materials to circulate, while also making it difficult to see what else is maintained alongside them.

Circularity does not begin with the circular economy

People have always repaired, reused, passed on, transformed and redistributed things, embedding these movements in practices of kinship, exchange, care, obligation, livelihood and memory that cannot be reduced to the efficient management of resources. Clothes move between generations, buildings are adapted to new purposes, food circulates through gifts and communal events, and objects acquire different meanings as they pass through households, markets and social worlds. Rather than representing incomplete or technically deficient versions of a future circular economy, such practices constitute historically and culturally specific forms of circulation, organised through their own understandings of what is valuable, what should be preserved, what can be abandoned and to whom responsibility is owed.

An object may remain in circulation because it retains a market price, but it may equally continue to move because discarding it would be considered wasteful or morally inappropriate, because it connects one generation to another, because its repair demonstrates knowledge and skill, or because giving it away sustains a social relationship that exceeds the object itself. CE interventions therefore never enter empty spaces in which materials have been waiting for experts to set them in motion, but encounter sociomaterial worlds in which things, values, obligations and responsibilities are already circulating, even if these movements remain illegible to the categories through which formal waste management recognises a system.

This is precisely where anthropology changes the starting point, since it does not begin with the assumption that circularity must be introduced, but with an inquiry into the multiple circulations that already exist, how they have emerged historically, which relationships they reproduce and how they are experienced by those participating in them. Such an approach does not imply that locally established systems are necessarily equitable or environmentally beneficial, but it does require that they be understood before interventions take place. Otherwise, efforts to impose a supposedly more circular system may dismantle the very circulations already doing essential social and environmental work, while erasing the knowledge and labour that sustain them.

Materials never circulate alone

Material flow analyses allow us to follow quantities of matter through production, consumption, recovery and reintegration, thereby making visible where resources are lost and where loops might be closed. Yet materials never circulate by themselves, since every movement depends on people who recognise value, distinguish one material from another, negotiate prices, maintain machines and relationships, interpret regulations and anticipate what might still become of things that others have discarded. Alongside matter travel classifications, responsibilities, risks and forms of knowledge, all of which shape whether an object continues along a particular trajectory, changes direction or ceases to move altogether.

A second hand object does not simply return to a market as though its value had survived intact, but must be noticed, assessed, cleaned, repaired and made intelligible to somebody who might want to use it again. Keeping it in circulation therefore involves more than attending to its physical condition, since the settings of exchange, the credibility of sellers, the histories attached to things and the practical possibility of finding another use must also be continually reproduced. The same applies to industrial materials whose circularity appears to be secured by technological processes, since recovered metals, plastics or battery components remain entangled with energy systems, transport routes, labour arrangements, regulatory categories and extractive industries that the image of a closed loop often places outside its frame. Recycling does not dissolve these relations, but rearranges them, sometimes reducing environmental pressures in one place while shifting labour, pollution and responsibility elsewhere.

To understand circularity as a culturally informed process rather than an intrinsic quality of an object is therefore to recognise the dispersed labour through which materials are kept in motion. Someone decides whether an appliance is worth repairing, whether a textile can find another user, whether a substance is treated as recoverable material or hazardous waste, and whether the time required for its recovery is economically or socially defensible. This work of distinguishing, assessing and deciding is frequently informal, poorly paid or unpaid, taking place in households, repair shops, depots and provisional arrangements that rarely appear in official representations of circular systems. Once an object has successfully returned to use, the sequence of interventions behind that return can disappear from view, creating the impression that the material has moved by virtue of its own recoverability rather than through a sociomaterial arrangement of skills, decisions and dependencies.

A system may consequently achieve impressive recovery rates while depending on unsafe labour, precarious livelihoods or the transfer of responsibility to households and informal workers, just as a product may be celebrated as circular while the infrastructures required for its production continue to depend on extraction, high energy consumption and unevenly distributed environmental harm.

Following the material alone may therefore produce an account of technical success, whereas following the labour, relationships and responsibilities through which it moves can reveal a more contradictory arrangement in which environmental benefits and social costs are not only intertwined but sometimes condition one another.

Different circulations sustain different worlds

CE approaches frequently presume that environmental value provides a sufficiently shared orientation, so that reducing waste, extending product lives and recovering more material can appear as self evidently desirable aims. In everyday practice, however, decisions about discarded and reusable things are rarely organised around one value alone. Repairing an object may conserve material while demanding time that is urgently needed elsewhere, preserving an inherited item may maintain cultural memory while offering little economic value, and formalising a recycling system may improve occupational safety while undermining forms of autonomy on which workers depend. Rather than being external obstacles to an otherwise coherent model, these tensions constitute the situations through which the actual directions and limits of circulation are negotiated.

Anthropology is particularly useful here because it approaches ethics not primarily as a set of principles applied to practices from outside, but as something taking shape through concrete decisions in which obligations, uncertainties and possible consequences cannot be fully separated from one another. An apparent delay within a system may provide the time required to inspect, adapt or find another destination for an object, while an increase in throughput may shorten the interval in which alternative uses could have emerged. What keeps a circulation operating is not a single shared intention, but the provisional compatibility of many activities, rules and expectations that may hold together for a time before becoming rearranged. When these arrangements become unstable, the work previously absorbed into everyday routines becomes perceptible, revealing how much adjustment was necessary to maintain what had appeared to function almost automatically.

Attending to time complicates the apparent neutrality of circulation even further, since different circles move at different speeds and generate different possibilities for action. Repair can be slow, requiring diagnosis, experimentation, material knowledge and repeated attention, while the circulation of objects between generations may unfold over decades and derive its meaning precisely from this duration. Industrial processing, speculative exchange and the movement of capital, by contrast, can accelerate circulation to the point where the recovery of materials or the promise of their future value supports the continued expansion of production and consumption. Slowness is not inherently caring, since repair may be imposed by scarcity and sustained through exhausting unpaid work, just as speed is not inherently destructive when rapid collection prevents hazardous substances from accumulating, but every temporal arrangement privileges particular actions and forms of participation while making others more difficult.

What becomes important, then, is not simply how rapidly or efficiently an object re-enters a productive cycle, but what becomes possible during its continued movement and what is foreclosed by the form that movement takes. One circulation may preserve practical knowledge, secure an income or maintain a relationship, whereas another may mainly shorten the route by which recovered matter is returned to production, even as the scale of extraction and consumption continues to grow. Both may appear under the name of circularity, although they produce quite different social and ecological consequences. The ethical question is therefore not exhausted by determining whether something circulates, but requires attention to the relations its movement reproduces, the futures it makes more likely and the losses excluded from the account of success.

Infracycles and the view from within

During my research on recycling infrastructures in Phnom Penh, I encountered a system that did not resemble a coherent infrastructure organised around a single centre, but was continuously brought into being through the intersecting movements of waste collectors, recyclable materials, money, knowledge, stories and social relationships. These movements crossed conventional distinctions between formal and informal, local and global, social and technical, revealing an infrastructure whose relative stability emerged not from its fixed physical form but from recurrent practices of collecting, sorting, selling, maintaining and negotiating.

In my book, Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia: Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh, I use the concept of infracycles to describe the smaller, situated and overlapping cycles through which such an infrastructure materialises. Infracycles consist of recurrent, repetitive and recursive practices through which materials, knowledge and relationships circulate while referring back to and continuously reproducing the infrastructure of which they form a part. They shift attention away from an understanding of infrastructure as a stable entity that transports materials from one point to another and toward the processual constellations through which materials and practices repeatedly encounter one another, creating enough stability for a system to work without ever forming a fully integrated whole.

Looking at circularity through infracycles makes visible that the cycles constituting an infrastructure do not necessarily fit together neatly, move at the same pace or produce compatible outcomes. They overlap, interfere with one another and sometimes create possibilities precisely through their frictions. A cycle recovering the economic value of discarded material may simultaneously reproduce social marginalisation, while another may enable autonomy and solidarity under conditions of persistent insecurity. The analytical purpose of infracycles is therefore not to substitute another ideal model for the closed loop, but to follow circularity from within, attending to the recurrent practices through which infrastructures are maintained, the relations they temporarily stabilise and the materials, people and possibilities that nevertheless slip through their ordering attempts.

For circular economy practitioners, such a perspective suggests that interventions should begin by following existing circulations and spending time with those who collect, sort, repair, sell, assess and maintain, asking which forms of knowledge their work requires, how value is produced and how responsibility and risk are distributed. It requires taking locally established practices seriously as forms of knowledge without romanticising the inequalities that may be reproduced through them, while also recognising that technical efficiency can damage livelihoods, erase material knowledge or weaken relations of mutual support. It further means considering what an intervention interrupts, rather than evaluating it only according to what it creates, since the formalisation of one loop may close down other circulations whose social and environmental significance was never included in the original model.

The most consequential problem with the circle is that its formal simplicity makes movement appear innocent, even though circulation always sustains particular materials, relations and versions of the future.

It may sustain an object, a livelihood, a relationship or a form of cultural memory, while also maintaining an extractive industry, a speculative market or an unequal distribution of labour and harm. The central ethical and political distinction is therefore not simply between linear and circular systems, but between different kinds of circularity, the worlds they materialise and the unequal capacities of actors to decide what should circulate, how its value should be measured and whose work or losses remain outside the frame.

Circular economy approaches have become highly skilled at asking how materials can be kept in motion.

Anthropology asks us to remain with the circulation for longer, tracing the labour, relations, histories and moral worlds moving alongside those materials before deciding which cycles should be sustained, which require transformation and which should finally be allowed to end.

This reflection was inspired by the EASA panel “The Ethics of Circularity”, convened by Justin Lau and Hoang Ngọc Yến Le, and by the contributions and subsequent discussion with Justin Lau, Juli Huang, Aishwarya Mukhopadhyay, Louise Bechtold, Tenno Teidearu, Roberta Raccomandato, Michelle Geraerts, Hoang Anh Thu Le and Hoang Ngọc Yến Le.

View the panel programme here. https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easa2026/panel/17971