Paper short abstract:

From the ethnographic exploration of the daily routine of a voluntary association, this paper analyzes Italy’s delicate phase of transition towards a circular economy, showing how the underlying narrative that fuels policies hybridizes with core values and ideas of local circularity practices.

Paper long abstract:

In the last ten years, the circular economy (CE) has gained authority to the point of being considered one of the pillars of the EU’s Green Deal. Despite the consensus on the unsustainability of our current system, CE is still a strongly contested concept (Korhonen et al., 2018). Caught between the proliferation of alternative definitions and the strive toward a single paradigm, CE is an important battleground for the future shape of our economy (O’Hare and Rams, 2024). This theoretical friction is evident in Italy, where the implementation of CE policies clashes with the microcosm of the often unrecognized “actually existing” circularity practices (O’Hare, 2021). Labelled as one of the most circular countries in the EU (CEN, 2023), Italy embodies these contradictions by discovering its landscape of circular initiatives while narrowing them in favor of a recycling-focused paradigm. These efforts risk generating processes of marginalization, pushing the initiatives that fail to be labelled as circular metaphorically at the edges of the circle. This paper deepens this dialogic dimension from the perspective of a local reality entangled in this process: the voluntary association Re.So. Based in the city of Empoli (Tuscany) and composed only of retirees, Re.So collects products with defective packaging, food near the expiring date or broken appliances to repair from large-scale distribution to give them to families in need. Rooted in cooperativism’s history of solidarity, volunteers are crafting their own CE, posing compelling questions on citizens’ participation in realizing a circular future.