The global transition towards the circular economy is often presented in an idealised and apolitical way, as the recirculation of matter and energy within a closed economic system that encompasses a homogeneous humanity and nature. This model promises resource and energy security, as well as a reduction in the social and environmental impacts of extractive activities and waste disposal. But in a world marked by global inequalities, one might ask: how are the costs and benefits of this model distributed? Which people and which environments must deal with the hazards and inconveniences of dealing with the world’s waste before reincorporating it into the system? Who is building autarchy over whose resources? Moreover, to what extent are global circular economies built around the template of global capitalism, with the unequal exchange of value and hazards between centers and peripheries at its core? Can these economies subvert exploitative relations and unsustainable patterns of resource consumption, or do they depend on them? 

These questions help us reveal how the waste flows of certain circular economies contribute to a landscape of environmental injustice, challenging the sustainability and equity claims of the circular economy. 

Trade-offs in the Global Circular Economy 

Organising the global circular economy involves a variety of trade-offs, unevenly distributed between rich and poor communities at different scales. 

Consider the ambivalences of ship recycling in Bangladesh, the trade of used cars and second-hand fast fashion clothing in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the repurposing of electrical and electronic waste in many scrap markets across the Global South. While these activities extend the useful life and the accessibility of goods and materials while hypothetically reducing the impacts of extraction and production elsewhere, they come at the cost of releasing pollutants into the environment and exposing waste-workers to harmful substances.  

Local industries can also be negatively impacted. For example, the dumping of used clothing in the Agbogbloshie market, Ghana, not only creates tons of textile waste in the process of selecting reusable clothes, but also has caused concerns for outcompeting local garment production, deepening the economic dependency of the region. 

Even proposals aimed at reducing the dumping of waste from developed to developing countries, such as the Ban Amendment of the Basel Convention and the Best of Two Worlds approach for e-waste recycling, have overlooked emerging environmental injustices related to waste dumping outside North-South binaries. Their reparatory potential for waste workers’ livelihoods is also limited. 

The Basel Amendment leads to the criminalisation and loss of circular livelihoods by banning the export of used electronics from OECD countries to the rest of the world, even when they’re not subjected to hazardous recycling practices. This is also the case with some extended producer responsibility schemes that deprive the informal sector of the access to waste materials under the discourse of protecting it from hazardous waste. 

Meanwhile, the Best of Two Worlds approach relies on an old international division of labor: developing countries engage in labor-intensive disassembly of scrap materials, while value-added refining occurs in the Global North. In the end, such schemes coincide more with addressing the Global North’s resource security concerns over critical minerals than with the development of environmentally sound and higher value-added circular economies in the South. 

The Challenge for the Bottom Links of Supply Chains 

Beyond waste management, the question remains: how can the bottom links of production chains in the linear economy benefit from the transition to the circular economy? Does the transition have a reparatory potential, or does it merely represent the abandonment of workers and greenwashing of histories of exploitation and environmental degradation? (Consider the case of Umicore, an e-waste recycling giant with colonial origins in the Belgian Congo). 

Recirculating or Transferring Waste? 

In addition to these tradeoffs, the global circular economies described seem to depend on, rather than challenge, global inequalities and unsustainable consumption patterns. 

Far from mapping into a perfect circle, they represent the transfer of waste and excess goods towards new markets — especially since coordinating circularity in globally dispersed production networks is difficult to attain. Take the example of the trade in used cars moving from Japan to Sub-Saharan Africa. While these cars are “recirculated” if we take the global economy as our unit of analysis, a more accurate description of their movement shows they are handed down between spaces with a different enforcement of environmental and safety regulations, as well as with differing income levels that allow one person’s trash to become another’s treasure. 

In many of the contexts I describe, circularity appears as driven by material deprivation and inequality, rather than by choice. While the innovative and resourceful practices in these contexts should be recognised in an inclusive transition to the circular economy, for it to be a just transition, we must eliminate the romanticising of popular circularity as a coping strategy of the poor. We must think about how to reconcile circularity with decent work and quality of consumption. 

Finally, it remains to be seen to what extent such economies substitute the material supplies and the market share of the linear economy, rather than merely adding to them, or just being a byproduct that sees new business opportunities with the waste brought about by overproduction. These critical considerations would help differentiate between genuinely circular and extended linear economies. 

Which economic system for the circular economy? 

Global circular economies are full of ambivalences that raise important questions about how to make them more environmentally sound and socially just. How can the occupational safety of waste-workers be improved, while working with the grain of the popular circular economies they already built in flea and scrap markets around the world? At the same time, how can these circular economies move from being grounded in inequality, deprivation, and a constant supply of wasted goods, to stemming from the durability of goods accessible to everyone? 

Moving from an ideal model, to mapping the “really existing circular economy” is one of the first steps to imagine that transition. 

Disclaimer 

The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of IDS.