The idea of the circular economy appeals to me, and I think I know why. I recycle my household rubbish wherever I can, and I try to avoid wasting things. I also conduct anthropological research about waste and what makes something economically valuable. So perhaps the appeal lies in a rational sense that the circular economy is simply a good solution to the everyday problem of what to do with leftover things. Or maybe it is rather an intellectual appeal that allows me to think about how the economy itself functions. However, neither of these explanations is wholly correct. What appeals to me most about the circular economy is that it gives me a comforting feeling of security, at a time when I am worried about the environment. I have an unpleasant suspicion that this feeling conceals the limits to just how circular the economy can ever be.
The idea of the circular economy assumes that technocratic intervention can reform economic life in ways that minimize the environmental impact of human action. In this imagination, processes of production and consumption can be synthesized into an elegant closed cycle, where all that is used is reused. The idea feels intuitively like the biological truth that things that are born will eventually rot, return to the earth and provide sustenance for new life. But it also feels like the technical fantasy of the ‘perpetual motion’ device that runs on power generated by that very motion itself. I tend towards the latter interpretation, and view the circular economy through the metaphor of alchemy.
I argue that the fully circular economy is an unrealizable ambition, akin to the techno-magical aspirations of alchemists, whose work sought attractive yet impossible solutions to material problems. The fully circular economy is a hopeful fantasy of control in an age of environmental crisis. Like the alchemists’ quest to transmute common metals into more valuable ones, the circular economy uses experimental technical work to strive towards intuitive possibilities that are nonetheless impossible. In fact, thinking about the alchemy of the circular economy reveals something broader about the nature of work and human society.
When I became an undergraduate student of social anthropology in the 2000s, one of the earliest things I learnt was that when people are faced with misfortune that seems beyond their control, they will try to explain it. When they do so, it may be in a manner that allows for human intent and action to have fantastical impacts upon the world. This is partly what anthropologists mean by ‘magic’, and it is usually supported by an internally rigorous rationality and logic. That logic is where the distinction between magic and science grows hazy, and is the space where the alchemists practiced their craft. The idea of the circular economy posits hopeful human intervention into desperate and overwhelming material conditions. The aspiration is grounded in a technocratic language of experimentation, belied by the fact that the total fulfilment of its aims is as implausible as the chemical transformation of lead into gold.
David Graeber argued that the circular economy speaks to us on the same compelling terms as the biological cycles of water and life itself – in which everything ultimately returns to where it came from. However, despite the metaphorical resonances of the cycle in the human imagination, the circular economy is objectively different to such natural processes. This is because the circular economy’s processes of reincorporation are neither inevitable nor complete.
It is the fundamental nature of economic action to generate excess and waste. We can understand that waste as the condition of being temporarily out of value, which means that apparently unwanted things might become valuable again when located in the right social context. However, not all things can be wholly reincorporated into the value cycle, and not all things are destined to be even partly reincorporated. For example, some forms of waste remain dangerous in a terminal environmental sense, and cannot be safely returned to the earth once they are drawn from it (e.g. nuclear waste). Some other products of ingenious human work resist future transformation entirely and must remain in our soil, water, air and bodies, in the original hazardous form that we synthesized them. Here, David Bond’s research about synthetic ‘forever chemicals’ is a good case in point. These two examples are extreme ones, but they illustrate a more general point about the relationship between economy and environment: climate crisis cannot be averted by a techno-magical effort to reincorporate all the excess generated by economic action. In the face of existential threat, the technical ingenuity of the circular economy will not allow a growing human population to survive without people in developed nations also using less, having less and eating less.
The notion of a human civilization that progressively uses less is compelling but is at odds with a modernist notion of progress that still implicitly informs wider ideas about how human society should work. These assumptions are integral to many understandings of human development, even those that are critical of growth-based economic models. My own idea of decent human progress is probably no different. As an anthropologist I care about people. My instinct is that I would like them to have a plentiful range of food, pharmaceuticals, tools, computers and public transportation. It also seems important that people have the opportunity to do things beyond their narrow biological needs. This is an idea of development premised on the ability to flourish, not simply the ability to live. Here is the tension at the heart of my anthropological engagement with climate crisis, and an explanation for why the idea of the circular economy appeals to me: I would like a progressive human civilization to be comprised of happy people that can consume lots of things. However, I would like us to do so without the evident environmental repercussions that come with that consumption. The ideal of the circular economy is the alchemy that promises to make this impossible thing happen.
The circular economy is an aspirational notion that couples anticipation of the future with a hopeful assessment of the socially transformative potential of innovation. In this regard, one might think of the circular economy as part of a broader affective human engagement with technoscience. In such an engagement, specialists are imagined to ingeniously solve problems for the benefit of everybody else. However, despite the long history of human ingenuity, latter-day alchemists cannot meet climate crisis by fully closing the cycle of consumption and production. These contradictions surrounding the circular economy relate to how we think about work.
Every year I give a lecture to a large room full of university students, which is supposed to introduce them to economic anthropology. The challenge in that first lecture is to persuade the audience that the economy is worth thinking about and to convince them that it relates to social and political life (which is what most of the students are interested in).
My first economy lecture is really a sales pitch, which says that much of human life depends on the economy, that the economy is shaped by culture and politics and that anthropologists must understand such things to do their job properly. I tell the students that ‘economy’ refers to the processes by which humans produce, distribute and consume resources. Those processes are facilitated by transformative human action that allows a resource to become useful or desirable to other people. We call those transformative processes ‘work’. I spend the rest of the academic term showing why work and economic exchange are also political and cultural processes. I like giving these lectures because I believe in my own sales pitch, and I think that work speaks to the core of the human condition.
I have previously said that the idea of the circular economy might have an intellectual appeal to somebody with academic interests like mine. That is partly true, and I have wondered whether the circular economy appeals because it offers a techno-magical answer to a problem about work, which is that work is never perfect in its value transformation. In the aftermath of a work action, something is usually either leftover or lost or expelled. With this problem in mind, I will use a discussion of the moral and economic value of work to explain why the circular economy concept seems so magical.
A circular economy promises to allow the full value of work as social reproduction to be realized, while obscuring unproductive or exploitative toil. In societies which paradoxically think that work is both toil and good at the same time, a circular economy allows for all economic action to be deemed socially reproductive. The waste and recycling industries can be reconceived as ‘making the earth bear fruit’, in a manner that unites all economic parties in shared complex of fundamentally decent action. Doing so elides the fact that the person who consumes recycled resources, or who facilitates the recycling of their own waste, may be necessarily complicit in the deeply exploitative structures of that industry. This is partly how the appeal of the circular economy relates to perceptions of the moral value of work.
The circular economy appeals to popular understandings about the economic value of work because the concept strives to negate a frustrating truth about the inefficiency of human action. Despite the resonances of cycles in the imagination, and despite the value placed on the progressive capacity of people to solve problems, whenever humans work, they always waste or expel something. Work is economically imperfect, and we have not reached a point of human ingenuity where this fact has been overcome. There will always be entropy and loss when one form of energy is converted into another. In our deliberate economic actions, we strive to resist such processes and subvert the natural orders of imperfection. Perfect cycles of value posit a new anthropogenic order that overcomes natural restraints on the transformative capacity of human work. Such an impulse is akin to alchemy and expresses the broader urge to assert the primacy of culture over nature.
In the above, I have tried to explain why people are attracted to the idea of the circular economy, and why that idea is based on a misunderstanding of the relationship between work and action. I have argued that no economy can ever be fully circular. However, this does not imply that the circular economy project is a wasted effort. Rather, my intent is to locate the circular economy within the most pressing environmental problems of our time and highlight the final limits of the project. In doing so, the critique is intended to inspire reflection on what else needs to be done.
The circular economy is a socially productive set of projects that can make a positive contribution to the challenge of environmental crisis. However, the circular economy can never be fully circular on the grand scale that the concept implies; such a techno-magical notion would tend to comfort those who engage with it. In doing so, a narrow focus on the possibilities of the circular economy diverts attention from the more radical total reduction in human consumption that environmental crisis calls for. Waste will always be generated by processes of production and consumption because human action is economically imperfect. Not all such waste has the capacity to be reincorporated back into the value cycle, and the efforts to do so may themselves be socially harmful. As attractive as the proposition may be, the economy cannot function like alchemy.
The text of this blog post has been extracted from pages 215-222 of Circular Economies in an Unequal World: Waste, Renewal and the Effects of Global Circularity and edited to appear here with the author’s permission. Read the unedited excerpt here.
Andrew Sanchez is a social anthropologist whose research is largely on economy, power and working life. He also writes about race and decolonization. Prior to joining the University of Cambridge, he held teaching and research positions at the LSE, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the University of Kent in the UK.
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