A Critique of the Circular Economy: Scale, Temporality and the Detours of Waste’s Renewal

Abstract

Dominant ideas of the circular economy imagine seemingly endless transformative possibilities for waste’s renewal, reuse and re-evaluation—from minimising waste to landfill and extending the life of consumer products, to raising individual and household consciousness about the extent of consumer waste. Currently the prevalent policy when it comes to rethinking the value of material objects, the circular economy frames objects as part of a process of infinite revival—never quite becoming ‘waste’. It presents a powerful “imaginary about the future” (Kovacic, Strand, & Völker, 2020, p. 6) in which the future can be controlled by human intervention into processes of material renewal. The promise of ‘new life’ awaits. In this thesis, I ask: Is the circular economy really an uncomplicated cycle of rejuvenation? To what extent is waste ‘transformed’ by the cyclical logics of renewal? How do we make sense of the ways that waste resists transformation, persists and returns to haunt us? What is at stake in its renewal? I pursue these questions by challenging the circular economy’s assumptions of scale, temporality and the ontological division between subject and object. This thesis crosses borders, cultural forms and socio-cultural practices, unified by an overarching investment in exploring waste’s transformative potentials beyond circular economy logics. I problematise the singular, fixed scale and causal, determinative temporality of renewal primarily associated with the figure of the rational human actor. In the relational connections between bodies, objects and spaces, waste symbolically, affectively, discursively and materially implicates human subjects in ways that challenge attempts to contain it within set spatial scales and temporal trajectories. Attending to the complex and unpredictable trajectories of waste’s renewal reveals multiple interrelations between spatial scales (neighbourhood, household and body) as well as between timescales (past, present and future).