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Paper short abstract

This paper examines circularity as relational achievement rather than material property. Drawing on interviews with small organisations, it explores the everyday labour, care, and ethical judgments required to sustain circular networks, and asks when circular systems become difficult to live with.

Paper long abstract

Circular economy initiatives are often conceptualised as properties of materials: products designed for disassembly, resources travelling in loops through reuse, repair, and recycling. This paper shifts the analytical focus from materials to relations, drawing on qualitative interview data from a network-mapping exercise with small organisations participating in a local circular-economy exchange in Scotland. Rather than treating circularity as a technical achievement of objects, the paper explores how it is enacted as an ongoing relational accomplishment that is maintained through everyday organisational labour, coordination, and care.

The ethnography foregrounds the often-invisible work required to sustain circular exchanges: negotiating mismatched capacities, absorbing inefficiencies, translating circular ideals into accounting practices, and maintaining trust across uneven organisational landscapes. Circularity emerges as something fragile, contingent, and frequently exhausting. Ethical concerns surface less in explicit moral discourse than in practical judgments about whom to prioritise, what burdens are tolerable, and when participation becomes difficult to live with.

By reframing circularity as a property of socio-technical networks rather than materials alone, the paper reconsiders how labour, systems, and measurement are implicated in circular-economy projects. It suggests that dominant metrics (e.g. CEMIF) risk rendering relational work invisible, while data infrastructures themselves shape the ethical conditions under which circularity can be sustained. The paper contributes to debates on the ethics of circularity by offering a situated account of how value, waste, and care are negotiated in practice, and by questioning what it means to design circular systems that organisations can actually inhabit over time.