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Paper short abstract

This paper compares waste circulation in public and domestic spaces in Siliguri, India, showing how circularity depends on unacknowledged ethical work: workers absorb bodily risk while households manage timing and concealment. Together they show circularity's limits when care is out of sync.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how ethical labour emerges not within smooth circuits of reuse and recovery, but at moments where circularity falters, slows, or must be forcibly sustained. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Siliguri, eastern India, I juxtapose two sites often treated separately: the public world of streets, carts, animals, and dumping grounds, and the private interiors of middle-class homes. Together, these sites reveal how circularity depends on forms of ethical work unacknowledged within dominant circular economy imaginaries.

In the public domain, waste circulates through misaligned infrastructures and delayed governance, sustained by precarious sanitation workers' bodily labour and multispecies exposure. Circulation here is less closed loop than coercive demand: workers absorb risk, injury, and waiting to keep waste moving absent reliable systems. Within domestic interiors, waste rarely circulates freely. It is wrapped, hidden, stored, and delayed until the 'right' disposal moment. Menstrual waste, sacred residues, and everyday refuse are managed through careful timing and concealment, enacting ethical judgements prioritising dignity, privacy, and moral order over efficiency.

Placing these sites in dialogue, the paper argues that ethics emerge at circularity's thresholds—where care arrives too early, too late, or must be improvised amid unsynchronised infrastructures. Circularity, as imagined in policy, externalises its ethical costs onto households and workers, who quietly absorb the temporal and moral labour preventing waste from overwhelming everyday life. Attending ethnographically to waiting, delay, and bodily absorption allows us to rethink circulation's ethics beyond techno-moral solutions.