The limits of waste as a resource: a critique and a proposition towards a new scalar imagination for the circular economy model

Abstract

In the article, we critically confront the idea of waste-to-resource at the heart of the circular economy. We discuss some of the blind spots and shortcomings of three circular economy principles: designing out waste, emulating natural systems and decoupling economic growth from resource use. We suggest that their limitations are intimately connected to a scalar reasoning ruled by strict, disjunctive categories. Instead, we advance a flat, relational, trans-scalar approach and propose that the potential of a sustained circular economy promise requires a novel scalar imagination attentive to its multiple co-constituted spatialities, social relations and fluid materials.