The circular economy is over: The scalar politics of circular production

Abstract

Chinese

The circular economy is failing. Starting from this premise, this article advances a new pathway for research in circularity studies: a degrowth perspective that focuses on phasing out linear production by prioritising wellbeing. The article develops this perspective by challenging the scalar politics of circularity. It argues that the circular economy tends to re-localise value chains, creating new circuits of production. To critique this rescaling process, urban research needs to develop a territorial perspective on circular flows, one that analyses how the circular economy affects the wellbeing of ecosystems and inhabitants at the regional scale. The article argues that, to be useful, this perspective needs to understand the agents of phasing out, namely the workers in the circular economy and their allies in environmental movements and state institutions.

Keywords

circular economy inclusivity just transition urban regions workers

Introduction

Though ubiquitous in research and policymaking, the circular economy (CE) is not significantly reducing the use of raw materials. In this article, I stress the necessity of acknowledging this inefficacy. This will pave the way for a new understanding of circularity that foregrounds social justice, inclusivity, and reducing the global economy’s material throughput.

After more than a decade’s research on the CE and despite most EU member states adopting various CE frameworks, the European Court of Auditors measures a mere 0.4% increase in the (circularity) ratio of secondary material use between 2015 and 2021 (European Court Auditors (ECA), 2023). The European Environmental Agency warns that since 2010 the ratio of recycled materials in Europe has increased only 1% and the EU is now even more dependent on raw materials imports than it was a decade ago (European Environmental Agency (EEA), 2024). The overall proportion of minerals handled in a circular manner has decreased and the small steps towards circularity remain limited to biomass and fossil-based materials. Even the recycling rate of plastic, circularity’s low-hanging fruit, decreased between 2011 and 2021 (European Parliament (EP), 2024).

The Netherlands – where CE policies are pioneered and many CE publications appear – is also not performing. In 2023, a Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency report attested that, despite CE frameworks being in place for 12 years, raw material use has not declined (PBL Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency, 2023). The number of Dutch (circular) businesses processing secondary materials has increased slightly, but only in absolute numbers. Today, just 6% of all companies are in the so called ‘circular sector’ and they all depend on state subsidies, which amount to 10% of all subsidies to industry. CE initiatives are still nascent, the report says; unsupported, they die.

China is another major player in the CE in terms of research and investment. It too is underperforming. ‘Much of the general “success” in China’, studies show, ‘can be attributed to “low hanging fruits” of continuous efficiency improvements in production processes’, particularly in metal production (Bleischwitz et al., 2022: 106350). China’s ostensibly successful circular ventures tend to fail quickly (Huang, 2021) and its CE is not growing (Wang et al., 2021). The CE is also failing in Sweden and Norway (Kalmykova et al., 2016; Mattson et al., 2024).

The CE is also not happening at a global level, the world’s circularity ratio having dropped from 9.1% to 7.2% between 2018 and 2023 with the increasing extraction of virgin materials (Circle Economy, 2024). Despite the global financial crisis and COVID pandemic, as much raw material has been extracted in the last eight years than during the entire 20th century (Krausmann et al., 2018). Since the Second World War, the global economy’s material footprint has shown no signs of reduction (Wiedmann et al., 2020), yet funding for and publications on the CE have grown exponentially.

Devised to produce economic wealth by upcycling waste, CE businesses struggle. In 2024 circular businesses have gone bankrupt across Europe. Ioniqa, a Dutch Glycolysis-based chemical recycling tech company, closed in 2024. The Dutch plastic waste sector is in crisis. France’s Ÿnsect, a ‘circular’ business producing insect-based proteins from biowaste, went bankrupt despite receiving €600 million in venture capital. Already in 2015, about 60% of tech-based insect farming circular companies were declaring bankruptcy in the first five years of operation (de Silva et al., 2015). In farm, a vertical farming giant using secondary biomass active in Western Europe and US, has also closed, the latest of many failed indoor crop farming companies employing water reuse and phosphorous upcycling. In 2024, the Swedish circular fashion company Renewcell filed for bankruptcy in Stockholm after 12 years of operation and €10.6 million of venture funding.

At the same time, corporate tech giants in the linear economy are benefitting from the CE investments as receivers of public subsidies, which help establish smart digital infrastructures for ensuring material efficiency at the source of a given value chain. The main beneficiaries of these investments are companies that are far from representative of a CE, including Apple Inc., Ikea, H&M, Jaguar, Land Rover, Coca-Cola, and Unilever (BCC, 2024).

Arguably, the CE is everywhere and nowhere: the public and private funds poured into circular businesses are clearly struggling to help dematerialise and decarbonise the global economy. In what follows, I argue that this is the outcome of the inability of circularity studies (and policy) to break with mainstream understandings of the CE and take seriously the challenge of phasing out production. CE research must instead problematise the scalar politics that accompany the phasing out of production (both linear and circular), looking at its territories and subjects.

A circular economy of phasing out

In a letter promulgated in November 2024, an alliance of NGOs, governments, and businesses demanded that the European Parliament adopt a holistic approach to circularity centred on reduction. They advocate the taxation of production and designing out of wasteful consumerism. They also demand a rescaling of CE programmes to support local and regional authorities, which are de facto responsible for meeting 70% of the Green New Deal’s circular targets. They demand a focus on quality work over capital gains (European Environmental Bureau (EEB), 2024).

The letter indicates an increasing scepticism of an idea that recurs frequently in CE research: that a transition to circularity requires a politics of phasing in circular production, which would remove barriers to new production and favour co-production and collaboration between incumbent and circular firms and the state (see Evertsen and Knotten, 2024). Instead of this green growth approach to circularity, I argue that reduction-focussed circularity needs a degrowth approach. By pursuing the phasing out of environmentally problematic economic sectors, which are unnecessary for the wellbeing of people and the environment, this approach would create room and resources for socially necessary circular productions and place users and workers at the centre of the economy. By putting reduction at the centre of the critique of the CE it becomes possible to envision more inclusive and just forms of circularity.

Critical voices in CE research have already moved in this direction. Hobson and Lynch (2016) questioned growth-led circularity almost a decade ago. Others have reached the same conclusion after assessing existing approaches (Bauwens, 2021; Schultz and Pies, 2024). Nesterova and Buch-Hansen urge a ‘deep circularity’ that includes degrowth values (Nesterova and Buch-Hansen, 2023). Raworth’s (2017) regenerative economy also breaks with the unilateral pursuit of economic output. Work on CE programmes’ rebound effects (Greene et al., 2024; Schultz et al., 2024; Zink and Geyer, 2017) and the social dynamics of using circular technologies (Genovese and Pansera, 2021) reaches similar conclusions. Savini (2019), Friant et al. (2020) and Thompson et al. (2024) show that, in cities, the CE’s efficacy depends on how closely it is linked to targets for reducing production and consumption.

Despite these clear (if few) signs of an emerging degrowth approach to circularity, there is surprisingly little research on the scalar politics calling for the phasing out of production. Where it does appear, it is readily dismissed. Kirchherr (2022) recapitulates the tired critique that degrowth entails returning to the ‘stone age’ while being academically ‘fashionable’ today. These claims ignore the fact that degrowth centrally promotes decent living (Millward-Hopkins et al., 2020) and overlook the green-growth approach’s ubiquity in academic discourse. Instead of being carefully tested in practice, the CE is recursively redefined (see Corvellec et al., 2022).

Research on everyday practices of circularity (many of which are older than the term CE itself) indicates the value of a degrowth perspective, showing that circular economies require a radical shift towards sufficiency in individuals’ and collectives’ quotidian consumption and production practices (Hobson, 2020). This shift, which is to be founded on care for materials and communities (Morrow and Davies, 2022), clearly questions wasteful consumerism and its individualist ideology. In so doing, it promises to build a new culture of sharing, sufficiency, and reuse from the grassroots up (Coskun et al., 2022; Zapata Campos et al., 2023). These practices not only seem to reduce the use of materials at the local and community levels; they also combine this reduction with social justice targets and can provide the foundation of a postcapitalist approach to circular production (Deutz, 2023). They show that a sufficiency focus does not necessarily mean an increase in prices for poor consumers but in fact can provide affordable access to key resources such as food, health, and housing.

Despite this evidence, existing research does little to identify the conditions under which these practices succeed in contesting the dominant, capitalist and green-growth variant of the CE (Bahers and Rutherford, 2025). In practice, everyday circularity is often marginalised or suppressed as it clashes with business-led programmes (Meilinger and Monstadt, 2022; Verga and Khan, 2022). Many more practices of grassroots circularity instead coexist with – or even depend on – dominant modes of capitalist production, not least because the latter provides the necessary surplus (of stuff, food, materials, and heat) that everyday circular practices need to function (Lekan et al., 2021). In other words, Nestlé or Walmart might not care if volunteers collect and reuse the food they waste; they are probably happy that somebody handles their unsold products free of charge. Everyday practices of circularity often also provide the middle classes with a moral licence for consumption and depoliticise systemic transformations (Eickhoff, 2024).

Research aiming to advance a degrowth approach to circularity must conceptualise the CE’s scalar politics: the power struggle among different forms of circular production, the territories in which this struggle plays out and the subjects that are involved in it.

The scalar politics of circularity

At the core of a critical analysis of the scalar politics of circularity lies the process of resourcification: the institutional, political, and ideological mechanisms that transform underused materials into resources, whether now or in the future (Corvellec et al., 2021). By creating new circuits of production and consumption, the circular economy does rearticulate the spatial, political and institutional arrangements that establish materials’ social and economic value (Savini, 2023). If a resource is both material and symbolic, the CE is both a reorganisation of socio-technical systems and an emerging imaginary shaping people’s relation with materials and products (Hermann et al., 2022).

The creation of monetary value from materials depends on their geographical flows. The CE should be understood as a rearrangement of the geopolitics that characterise the linear economy and its infrastructures, creating new subjects of production and consumption, and new business opportunities.

The global economy is already circular. Every territory’s economy already produces material surpluses, which are either reused, processed, used to generate profit, or dispersed as unwanted environmental externalities, whose management can also generate profit. Yet this linear (yet circular) economy generates little economic value, since materials are dispersed into inefficient and (institutionally and financially) invisible circulations. Informal waste picking, which sustains many communities, is also already a form of circularity, one that often emerges at the periphery of capitalist production. Nevertheless, mainstream, growth-led circularity sees this practice as irrelevant (Demaria, 2023).

When production is about matter, distance is crucial. What distinguishes CE discourses and programmes from the linear ones is the creation of economic value by re-localising material flows. In the context of the CE, re-localisation refers to the creation of new production circuits by shortening the value chains of specific goods, beginning with the processing of secondary materials. This process is expected by governments and businesses to generate employment and profits, but so far, it appears to be falling short of those expectations. Furthermore, it makes large urban regions the central sites of circularity because it is there that most waste is produced, most secondary materials can be found, workforce is concentrated, infrastructures are in place and surplus capital is ready to be invested. As the Ellen McArthur Foundation asserted 10 years ago, in a CE growth comes from ‘within’, that is, by increasing the value derived from existing infrastructures, products, and materials in Europe (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2015).

It is no surprise therefore that city-regions have pioneered the implementation of European and national CE policy frameworks, being seen as territorial ecosystems for CE success (Bourdin and Torre, 2025; Calisto Friant et al., 2023; Fratini et al., 2019; Kopp et al., 2024). Research shows that circular jobs and funds have grown most significantly in metropolitan areas (Niang et al., 2024). CE policies are regularly made in cities, even if not monitored (Kopp et al., 2024). Urban and regional CE policies shift the ‘spatial burden’ of waste processing from the hinterlands back to urban areas (Elliot et al., 2024).

This re-localisation triggers numerous investments in circular infrastructures, particularly in densely populated areas where large material flows are to be industrially connected and the concentration of enterprises fosters efficiency (Monstadt and Coutard, 2019; Voukkali et al., 2024). In the notably linear construction sector, re-localising the value chain would enhance circularity. Given that transportation and storage costs are high and secondary materials have little value, local processing has business advantages (Wildeboer and Savini, 2022). Smart-crushing techniques and high-tech development can create high-value jobs. Policy recommendations in this sector demand greater synergy between cities (which supply construction waste) and their proximate hinterlands (Kliem et al., 2021). The same holds for food and heat, which cities consume and produce in large quantities. The most economical way to valorise these resources is to process them near their source (Papangelou et al., 2020).

Urban and regional studies have already made progress in examining the governance of this scalar process. Williams (2019, 2021) shows that the circular economy functions as both a socio-technical and discursive device, enabling a broad range of interventions – from nature-based solution to loop-based technologies. Cities offer the dense social and infrastructural environments where these interventions can strengthen each other. Economic motives, Williams argues, are pivotal drivers of circularity, which face clear challenges in terms of participation, cultural change and inclusivity.

A critical city-regional perspective on CE is valuable because it reveals how cities are restructured through the re-localisation of production circuits. As Deutz et al. (2024: 553) argue ‘the study of a place can illuminate how hitherto disconnected societal processes operating across scales converge within a place and the particular socio-spatial configurations, contexts and conditions resulting from and reproduced by that process of convergence’. Similarly, Newsholme et al. (2022) show that the CE triggers rescaling processes that clash with existing geographies of production and power relations (see also Bassens et al., 2020; Lekan et al., 2021). Rescaling generates new forms of production while excluding others, raising conflicts and resistances from workers and producers. The conflicting nature of circular production demands a critical examination of the politics underlying CE. Yet, it is not enough to assess how city-regions implement circularity. My argument is that we need an explicitly territorial perspective – one that reveals and interrogates the social, environmental, and economic implications of rescaling material flows beyond narrow urban boundaries. A territorial perspective focuses on the changing geography of these flows – on their territorialisation – and the creation (and destruction) of economies of proximity. For both research and policy, this perspective becomes most promising when it is used to explain the shifting role of workers in the changing geographies of material circulation.

The challenge for researchers is to explain how rescaling material flows will affect both urban areas’ environmental footprint globally and their inhabitants’ livelihoods (Bahers et al., 2020). For example, significant petrochemical production was made possible by companies’ ability to dispose of waste in distant wastelands and environments. This made certain regions dependent on petrochemical industries. Given the fear of losing valuable export-oriented jobs, downscaling these industries in such regions is politically difficult; it will affect the distant wastelands and its communities dependent on those productions. Like many other extractivist industries, the plastic industry has been de-territorialised from the sites of production and consumption through the possibility of hiding waste’s social and environmental consequences.

Early critiques of regional production and consumption in global economies have already provided conceptual tools to develop a territorial perspective on circularity, and some research has already used them (Brown, 2019). The territorialist tradition of planning – an approach based on bioregionalist philosophy–emerged in response to economic growth’s growing detachment from societal wellbeing in large agglomerations. Territorialism identified this gap as the root cause of states and international organisations becoming unilaterally interested in, and ultimately dependent on, dedicating their resources to enhancing global competitiveness (Magnaghi, 2020). In so doing, they detach economic production from their ecosystems’ and inhabitants’ material needs. The depletion of habitats, the homogenisation of cultures, and the alienation of work from the very needs of places and their communities are key symptoms of this detachment. To counteract this process, the notion of a bioregion has been used to advocate a form of production (and spatial planning) tailored to a region’s unique geo-physical properties: a shift from economic and infrastructural designs being imposed on territories to territorial designs (see Magnaghi, 2020).

A territorialist approach to CE centred on bioregions can productively link circularity studies with degrowth research because it questions the hierarchies between cities and their global hinterlands of raw material extraction. It also claims to design circular value chains that bring wealth to places rather than global capital (Cato, 2011; Church, 2014). As Wearne et al. (2023: 2124) argue, bioregionalism performs three shifts at once, inspiring ‘visions of the future that encompass more-than-human thriving’, enabling ‘a strategic narrative for change that connects places to larger scales’, and stressing ‘the importance of everyday people exercising their right to “do” something’. Although it has yet to adopt a bioregional perspective, CE research seems to suggest that urban–rural symbiosis is crucial for circularity (Joensuu et al., 2020), particularly in the food sector, which is clearly essential (Walsh et al., 2023).

The territorial perspective that I am advocating for needs to explicitly address the geopolitics of circularity, whether by challenging power structures that sustain extractivist and consumerist economies or grounding economics in territories’ morphology, ecologies, and existing cultures (James and Cato, 2017). Critiquing the economic model of circularity, it should instead foreground human and ecological needs in the regulation of economic flows (Tornaghi and Dehaene, 2020). This is clearly not a localist or identitarian project (for ecosystems extend beyond the administrative boundaries of states, cities, or regions), it is territorial: it understands ecosystems as cultural and political constructions. If CE programmes define these boundaries based on economic and profit motives, a territorial approach would prioritise agricultural, environmental, and social returns instead.

The subjects of circularity

Under capitalism, the phasing-out and rescaling of productions will turn into new forms of exclusion if carried out without caring for the current workers of the linear economy. CE research needs to focus on the subjects of transition and look at their struggle to create new territories of circular production. These are: (1) the workers of circularity employed, throughout the value chain of goods; (2) the environmental movements pressuring institutions to divest from linear production and unnecessary circular productions; and (3) the public institutions able to promote this new culture of consumption, to enact a just transition from production, and to oversee a socially oriented CE. These three subjects are directly concerned with the possibility of production being phased out; they stand to lose jobs, would have to regulate the transition, and ensure that the CE aligns with the public interest. Yet, as Pansera et al. (2024) have shown in their literature review, mainstream CE research regularly overlooks these subjects, instead focussing on quantitative, monetary and business-led understandings of the circular transition.

Phasing unnecessary production out and introducing necessary forms of circularity will affect work in many ways. It will valorise specific circular work: gathering, repairing, disassembling, and moving materials and things to ensure that they can be reused in forms of production that nurture ecosystems and fulfil essential needs (Martin, 2025). This environmental labour (Barca, 2019, 2020) will manage, preserve, and transform materials to maintain their use value. Consider how organic waste is managed to produce compost. The circular process starts with the collection or separation of food (or even the careful choice of ingredients) and ends with the careful reuse of compost in soil. CE research must make this circular labour visible as an agent of the transition to circularity.

Workers in the linear economy are directly concerned with circular transition because new circuits of production will shift productive forces, redefining the materiality of work, and rearranging workforce regulation (Multani and Bachus, 2024). Many miners and waste pickers currently depend on the extraction of cheap raw materials. In these ‘batshit jobs’ (Hansen, 2019), they must endure bad working conditions that reflect the environmentally harmful economies in which they work. As Anantharaman (2024) showed, this labour is not only marginalised in the current capitalist economy, but can also become an agent of transition away from growth-based and high-tech circular economies.

As both targets and subjects of circularity, these workers are already active players in the circular transition through their collective organisations. As cases in the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium show, unions are joining forces with environmental advocacy groups to devise incentives and premiums that foster circular production and re-skilling programmes (Fonteyn and van Noten, 2022) and to pursue a transition to sustainable production through workers’ cooperatives (Andretta and Imperatore, 2024; Orlando, 2021). These alliances also anticipate and contest the creation of new extractive industries for the green economy (Saleth and Varov, 2023). Still, as Clube (2022: 1) argues, we know very little about the struggles of circular workers in the transition, nor do we have a clear picture of ‘the skillset required in a CE, and whether citizens will be willing to engage in these jobs’. Burke and Grodach (2025) have just shown that the core jobs of the circular economy are labour-intensive, low-skilled and located in poorly accessible areas. There are also much less of these jobs than those provided by already existing linear economies (Burke and Grodach, 2025).

Focussing exclusively on workers, however, may not fully explain if and how production can be phased out. The transition to circularity is also an ideological transition, a shift from the economic and human-centred imaginary of profit-driven production and consumption to one pinned on care and maintenance (Dombroski et al., 2023). As producers of ideology, environmental movements and public administrations are crucial subjects as well. Ideology works at different levels, from the popular culture around material use to the regulatory, legal, and economic apparatuses that redefine matter’s value and thus shape its flows (Žižek, 1994). Property regimes, material regulations, subsidies, taxation, and trade tariffs all play a crucial role in the cultural shift towards circularity. These regulations define who is entitled to own and profit from circular production and which forms of material upcycling are considered desirable (Steenmans and Malcolm, 2020). Circularity should be understood as an ideological and institutional construct that ideally marks a transition from a model of production and consumption based on cheap raw materials and disposable surplus (Armiero, 2021) to one in which waste and the extraction are seen – and regulated – as undesirable.

The phasing out of unnecessary and environmentally destructive production inevitably demands a proactive state, less as a business partner but more as a planner of production. The state’s renewed role must be grounded in movements’ political desires for socio-ecological justice. For this reason, a critique of circular work cannot be delinked from an empirical analysis at the alliances between workers, social movements and state organisations. These subjects are co-producers of circular economies, and it is through their synergy that the process of defining necessary and unnecessary productions can become democratic (see Lloveras et al., 2025). Through those movements, political acts of everyday circularity generate political power and then establish regulatory frameworks. Again, the dialectic between workers, movements and the state is unexplored in CE literature or considered only from the consumer’s perspective.

New steps in circularity studies

This article has advanced a renewed perspective on circularity, moving beyond the limits of mainstream CE research and calling for more critical and transdisciplinary research on the scalar politics of circular production. Despite its popularity as a concept, circularity is missing its targets and failing as a business proposition. The current version of the CE seems fully compatible with the persistence of a linear economy.

One reason for this failure, I have argued, is the weak critique of growth articulated in CE research and practice. Only a handful of works in circularity studies have recognised the need for a degrowth perspective on the CE. Such a perspective focuses on the politics of phasing out certain forms of production, and on framing CE programmes as enhancing people’s and ecosystems’ wellbeing.

This article lays the groundwork for a degrowth perspective in circularity studies, emphasising the need for a detailed analysis of the scalar politics involved. It calls for combining empirical research on the emerging territories of circularity with an examination of workers as key subjects in the transition.

Today, CE discourses and policies feature a re-localisation of circuits of production and material flows, with urban and regional areas in a pioneering role. Little CE research questions how this rescaling process affects the social and ecological qualities of territories and communities, nor their exclusionary processes. I have argued that the groundwork for such analysis was laid by early critiques of regionalism and by the bioregionalist vision. The latter illuminates the relations among shifting circuits of material flows and their impacts on ecosystems and humans. Focussing on ecology, this approach offers a perspective that it is inclusive of both human and more-than-human entities.

The rescaling of production impacts workers, creating new political subjectivities within evolving social imaginaries of production. Rather than focussing solely on corporations or consumers, circularity studies should explore how workers become both agents and targets of new ideologies and institutions. They should also assess the extent to which the circular transition enhances workers’ well-being and skills. This analysis, I argue, must consider the alliances between workers, social movements, and state institutions, as their interactions drive the scalar politics of circularity.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors of the Special Issue, Ruth Lane, Lachlan Burke, Carl Grodach, and Anthony Kent, for their kind invitation to join this project, their comments on the first version of the article, and their work of editorship. Special thanks to the three anonymous reviewers for their extremely constructive and fruitfully provocative comments.

ORCID iD

Federico Savini

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the European Research Council, DECYCLE, award number 101039545.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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