Paper short abstract:

In my presentation, I will explore how in the context of searching for environmental solutions to e-waste recycling in New Delhi, instead of the threats of a linear economy, the potential for "closing material loops" is threatened by a vicious circle of substandard practices.

Paper long abstract:

Circular economy is usually contrasted to linear economy. Both these concepts are fast gaining ground in policymakers' imagination, because of the former's promise of cutting externalities and infinite material renewal. However, in India, where informal practices of material repurposing and reuse prevail, the idea of a circular economy is in fact defined against threats of other material circles and loops. This abstract builds on twelve months of ethnographic research with a Producers' Responsibility Organisation (PRO), in New Delhi, that aims to develop channels for environmentally responsible e-waste and plastics recycling. The PRO, in an attempt to build a business of complying with the law and Extended Producers' Responsibility (EPR), battles against various vicious circles and organic dismantling and material recovery practices that feed back into production.

In my presentation, I will explore how in the context of searching for environmental solutions to e-waste recycling in New Delhi, instead of the threats of a linear economy, the potential for "closing material loops" is threatened by a vicious circle of substandard practices. As a consequence, although company narratives and practices assume a straightforward equivalence between responsible recycling and circular economy, I will ethnographically show how the two are not necessarily the same. This abstract seeks to raise the questions, what does it take to establish circular economy and what is at stake in satisfying corporate obligations of compliance and efforts to incorporate responsible practices? What other kinds of circles and loops become visible when concentrating on establishing the required accountability and transparency?

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines water as a source of cyclical imaginaries. It juxtaposes cycling of the wastewater and objects at the landfills. The juxtaposition elucidates how materiality affects cycling and whether and how water cycle shapes the imagination about other kinds of cycles.

Paper long abstract:

Graeber (2012) argues that the concept of cycle is appealing because it addresses the tension between stability and change, which is relevant for both humans and objects. I start from a different point to explore the role of water in cyclical imaginaries. Water cycle represents one of the most critical processes that shape life on Earth. Water capacity for transformation between the states of matter, its ubiquity, and essentiality lends this cycle an aura of naturality that sparks the images of what an ideal cycle might look like. But what happens when this seemingly natural cycle occurs at the sites of waste disposal? The wastewater originates via decay and permeation through the layers of waste, it is accumulated in the underground cisterns, and gets sprayed back on the landfill's surface to enter another round of a never-ending cycle. At the same time, the disposed objects are scavenged, reused, exchanged, and eventually disposed again. These two cycles are similar yet different.

Building on ethnographic research among the Czech landfill workers, this paper juxtaposes two different kinds of cycling. First, cycling of the wastewater that takes advantage of water properties but has to tame it. Second, an informal recovery and revaluation of the objects disposed at the landfills that get back into the households or the market. The juxtaposition enables me to examine both, how materiality affects cycling and elucidates whether and how water cycle shapes the imagination about other kinds of cycles.

Paper short abstract:

Looking at the dynamics and relations occurring through European Union policies in Greece, this paper explores the localisation of the global process of shifting towards circular economy in a suburb in Athens through a transnational collaboration resulted in an e-learning toolbox freely open to all.

Paper long abstract:

Looking at the dynamics and relations occurring through European Union strategies in Greece, this paper explores the localisation of the global process of shifting towards circular economy in a suburb of Athens where representatives from public and private sector (cities, companies, universities) from Spain, Portugal, Malta and Greece worked together for an e-learning toolbox freely open to all. The ethnographic data focuses on the ways people, politicians, administrators, educators, citizens attended seminars and workshops, reflecting and commenting on the circular economy during the CLEAR project funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme. The project promotes a "servitisation" business model as a way to encourage the Circular Economy, highlighting consumers' engagement. It also promotes the "citizen - consumer" approach and the concept of "collaboration", bringing in front a distinct sense of citizenship. Beyond business models and waste management analyses, we scrutinise the "circular economy" as a multi-level collaborative process, and seek to unpack the ways people understand it and respond to such "new" ideas. Recycling and reusing are well-known to previous generations and bring in front social justice issues. Collaboration is now promoted as the key concept for improving people's awareness and actions on reducing waste and raw material. However, a lot of people are very concerned about institutional bureaucracy and corruption that such projects can imply or the neoliberal ideas they vehiculate, questioning in that way their impact to society.

Paper short abstract:

Ghana's scrap markets exemplify urban mining. Through a range of intermediaries, Ghana's scrap dealers connect to smelters and refineries in the country and abroad. The paper explores visions of metal circularity, their corporate realisations, and Ghanaian scrap dealers' global attachments.

Paper long abstract:

Ghana's scrap markets exemplify urban mining in that they connect waste streams to metal supply chains. With origins in Muslim savannah networks and laced with stories of rags-to-riches opportunity, the economies are largely self-organised but relying on international gatekeepers or intermediaries that connect the country's scrap to smelters and refineries around the world. These often invisible forms of scrap globalisation that bridge different entrepreneurs and economic logics have assumed new importance in recent years as media attention decries Ghana's e-waste toxicity and German-development is sponsoring a multi-million euro intervention in the country's scrap sector.

The paper teases out visions and practices of circular economy as a governmental technology, an international entrepreneurial spirit, and a community business in Ghana. Based on 12 months of research with Ghana's scrap dealers, international scrap buying companies, and auxiliary governmental actors, the paper reveals the stakes of defining circularity as a specific material transformation, circulation as a geography of trade, and an economy as a social domain of exchange.

Paper short abstract:

Implementing circular economy approach relies on the ability of people and communities to change their behaviour. Grassroots circularity is a concept that helps include bottom-up potential of local communities in adaptive reuse practices, developed in the context of three adaptive reuse projects.

Paper long abstract:

Prolonging the utility of products is the main aim of a circular economy. So far, this concept has been implemented in a growing number of areas, one of which is built heritage. The circular economy argues that, instead of destroying a building to make way for a new one, the owners or managers of the property should care for it systematically by repair and refurbishment.

The success of a circular economy approach depends on the ability of people and communities to change their behaviour and way of thinking, yet the existing action plans rarely take into account social aspect of implementing policies. As social anthropologists, we can contribute to a better understanding of the role and capacity of local communities in introducing new ideas of the circular economy in a bottom-up fashion.

We define this local potential for the implementation of circular solutions as grassroots circularity. In our study we analysed three adaptive reuse projects in the area of built cultural heritage using a social sustainability framework. We discovered that, while all five factors contributing to the social sustainability model are highly relevant in describing and understanding the successful implementation of bottom-up adaptive reuse projects, they require some modification in order to fit the circular economy model. As a result of our analysis, we can offer insight on how grassroots circularity can be diagnosed and understood. We believe that the concept of grassroots circularity widens the circular economy model to include the neglected bottom-up potential of local communities.

Paper short abstract:

In a national context of circular economy and inclusive recycling policies, I analyse the unfolding power relations among the actors that engage in a rapidly changing recycling economy in the city of Cartagena, Colombia.

Paper long abstract:

In 2018, the Colombian government implemented a national circular economy strategy, proclaiming itself the first in Latin America. Subsequently, six regional agreements have been signed, notably in the city of Cartagena, placing the recycling of waste materials at the forefront, together with inclusive recycling which impels the formalisation of recyclers. Based on an ethnographic research with recyclers in Cartagena, I aim to analyse the power relations at play among the actors engaged in a rapidly changing recycling economy. First, I look at how only a small proportion of the waste workers are engaging in the formalisation process to show how the recycling economy in the city becomes inclusionary or exclusionary. Hence, hidden by a discourse on the inclusion of a vulnerable population, further exclusions are legitimised. Second, I look at who are the actors benefiting from the formalisation process and I shed light on the role played by powerful corrupt entrepreneurs. By conceiving waste as a politicized materiality, I look at both the actors being made invisible and the invisible actors acting in the shadow of waste. In tracing the process, I seek to underline the complex relational logics underpinning the city's recycling economy. Moreover, I emphasis the necessity to look at the stakeholders in the shadow of waste politics, not as an exceptionality, but rather as constitutive of the power relations unfolding around waste. By delving into recyclers' formalisation process in Cartagena, the paper raises probing questions for our understanding of the virtuous circularity celebrated in circular economies.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing from an ongoing ethnographical research on food and refugees, our paper intends to reflect upon a non-waste circuit, put in place by a network of local activists in the city of Rome who share a civic, an environmental and an educational engagement

Paper long abstract:

Drawing from an ongoing ethnographical research on food and refugees, our paper intends to reflect upon a non-waste circuit, put in place by a network of local activists in the city of Rome, who recover unsold food from ovens, restaurants, neighborhood markets to distribute it to lay and religious associations committed with marginal subjects. In the detailed observation of collection and redistribution practices, a shared philosophy of non-waste becomes increasingly visible where the leftover and unsold food is put back into circulation becoming nourishment, and life. The non-waste network is tied to a wider civic, environmental and educational movement, which in Italy officially started in 2004 with Andrea Segrè, an engaged university teacher, exemplified by the studies of David Korten (2015) and Sarah Van Gelder (2014) among several others. A circular responsible economy seems to be a reaction against the current interpretation of the market based on a waste economy and a concrete proposal of action in a world still imbued by linear careless thinking. By means of fresh data derived by a detailed case-study in a complex urban setting, the present paper aims to adds its contribution to the ongoing debate on circularity in social sciences.

Paper short abstract:

This paper compares circular economic practices at a household level in England and Uruguay. The paper charts the opportunities for participants in both fieldsites to minimise their use of plastic and plastic packaging, principally through consumption choices or re-use practices.

Paper long abstract:

This paper compares circular economic practices at a household level in Cambridge (England) and Montevideo (Uruguay). It draws on interviews and participant observation conducted with ten households in each site, where participants were asked to keep a diary of their patterns of consumption, use, re-use, and disposal of plastics. The paper charts the opportunities for participants in both fieldsites to minimise their use of plastic and plastic packaging, principally through consumption choices or re-use practices, as well as the availability of recycling infrastructures. Taking a materials-centred approach, it explores the affective and practical ties that link and detach people and plastic in everyday life, as well as the way that global imaginaries of environmental pollution are grounded by people in vastly different sites. At an analytical level, the paper compares 'actually existing circularity' - everyday activities that conserve materials, design out waste, and maintain natural systems - to new initiatives that are much more likely to be explicitly described in the language of the circular economy. The first, I argue, tend to involve informal, community-based activities, while the latter are more likely to be organised by formal private-public sector actors.