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Paper short abstract

Circularity is not a property of materials but an ethical effort, achieved through situated judgment among competing goods. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Scotland, this paper asks what is lost, and what remains recognisable as ethics, when circularity moves from judgment to governance.

Paper long abstract

Circular economy policy imagines waste becoming resource through improved design and closed material loops. This paper argues instead that circularity is an ethical effort: an outcome of situated, ongoing judgment among competing goods (time, liability, trust, environmental commitment). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Scotland during a period of active circular economy legislation and indicator-building, the paper treats moments of definitional uncertainty, organisational hesitation, and administrative narrowing as data and as sites where the work of ethics becomes visible. Following anthropological approaches to ordinary ethics, it suggests that practical judgment enables circularity and actively constitutes it. This reframing has consequences for how we think about scale: the same evaluative labour that determines whether a single chair gets reused recurs, in a different register, in the classification choices behind national indicators, which stabilise circular transition as measurable outcomes while rendering the judgments that produced it invisible. What, then, is lost, and what remains recognisable as ethics, as circularity moves from everyday judgment to governance?