Toward a just circular economy: conceptualizing environmental labor and gender justice in circularity studies

Figures & data

Figure 1. Sources for the environmental justice dimension.

Figure 2. Selection process for labor articles.

Figure 3. Selection process for gender articles.

Table 1. Main findings and a potential research agenda.

Main research question: How can critical CE research help reorient CE practices and policy toward equality and justice?
Sub-research questions	Current literature	Potential research agenda
How does CE research engage with environmental inequalities? And how could CE models be reshaped toward reparation of ecological and climate debt?	Most CE works adopt a reduced understanding of circularity in terms of waste management and recycling. CE studies tend to ignore complex global dynamics in which power asymmetries create injustices through dispossession, contamination, and exploitation, especially in the global South.	Further research is needed to include the injustices linked to global supply chains into CE studies. CE initiatives need to explore North/South, geopolitics of global circulation, and labor implications of transitioning toward circularity. Issues of environmental conflicts, extractivism, and land dispossession need to be accounted for as factors in assessing CE initiatives.
Are workers’ subjectivity and agency considered in CE research? How could CE models be recentered around workers’ perspectives?	Most CE works focus on a quantitative perspective on labor by, for example, creating and maximizing green jobs. A minority of works suggest focusing on qualitative aspects such as wages, length of the working day, occupational health and safety, social protection, or trade-union representation. Alternative ownership models like self-management, democratic production forms, cooperatives, and so forth are almost totally neglected.	More studies are needed to understand the role of workers’ agency in a JCE. More studies are needed that take into account the employment effects of a transition to CE on a global scale. Future work might focus on global value chains and the international division of labor. Workers councils, democracy in the workplace, self-managed companies, and cooperatives are neglected concepts in CE studies and represent a promising field for further research.
How does CE research frame questions of gender and value? And how could CE models be reframed through a proper valuation of reproductive and care work?	CE’s potential to promote gender justice has not yet been fully assessed. Most CE initiatives are shaped by currently dominant gender/value constructs. CE reflects the same devaluation mechanisms that characterize the linear economy. For example, women tend to occupy the lower value-added positions and reproductive and care work are excluded from definitions of what is valued by the CE.	Reframing the CE so that it incorporates reproductive (and care) work. Redefining the value produced in CE to include the unpaid work that is often excluded from mainstream value theories and practices. Developing new indicators that can adequately account for the value of social and environmental reproduction in CE.

Table

Authors	Title	Journal	Publication date
Pla-Julian, I. and Guevara, S	Is CE the Key to Transitioning toward Sustainable Development? Challenges from the Perspective of Care Ethics	Futures	2019
Coghlan, C., Proulx, P., and Salazar, K.	A Food-CE-Women Nexus: Lessons from Guelph-Wellington	Sustainability (Switzerland)	2022
Vijeyarasa, R. and Liu, M	Fast Fashion for 2030: Using the Pattern of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to Cut a More Gender-Just Fashion Sector	Business and Human Rights Journal	2022
El Wali, M., Golroudbary, S., and Kraslawski, A.	CE for Phosphorus Supply Chain and its Impact on Social Sustainable Development Goals	Science of the Total Environment	2021
Declich, A.	Society and Materials: An Interpretation of the Subject in the Light of Sociology and Gender	Materiaux & Techniques	2018
McQueen, R., McNeill, L., Huang, Q., and Potdar, B.	Unpicking the Gender Gap: Examining Socio-Demographic Factors and Repair Resources in Clothing Repair Practice	Recycling	2022
Berry, B	Glut: Affective Labor and the Burden of Abundance in Secondhand Economies	Anthropology of Work Review	2022
van der Velden, M.	‘Fixing the World One Thing at a Time’: Community Repair and a Sustainable CE	Journal of Cleaner Production	2021
Morrow, O., and Davies, A.	Creating Careful Circularities: Community Composting in New York City	Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers	2022
Yanez, P.	Viability of CE in Non-industrialised Countries and its Adjustment to a Proposal Based on Transformative Economies: An Approach to the Latin-American Scenario	CIRIEC-España, Revista de Economía Pública, Social y Cooperativa	2021

Table

Authors		Title	Journal	Publication date
Wuyts, W., and Marin, J.		“Nobody” Matters in Circular Landscapes	Local Environment	2022
Marín-Beltrán, I., Demaria, F., Ofelio, C.,…, Mukul, S., and Costa, M.		Scientists’ Warning Against the Society of Waste	Science of the Total Environment	2022
Martinez-Alier, J.		Mapping Ecological Distribution Conflicts: The EJAtlas	Extractive Industries and Society	2021
Mah, A.		Future-proofing Capitalism: The Paradox of the Circular Economy for Plastics	Global Environmental Politics	2021
Chen, C.-W.		Clarifying Rebound Effects of the Circular Economy in the Context of Sustainable Cities	Sustainable Cities and Society	2021
Niskanen, J., McLaren, D., and Anshelm, J.		Repair for a Broken Economy: Lessons for Circular Economy from an International Interview Study of Repairers	Sustainability (Switzerland)	2021
Pansera, M., Genovese, A., and Ripa, M.		Politicising Circular Economy: What Can We Learn from Responsible Innovation?	Journal of Responsible Innovation	2021
Malinauskaite, J., and Jouhara, H.		The Trilemma of Waste-to-Energy: A Multi-purpose Solution	Energy Policy	2019
Mason-Renton, S., and Luginaah, I.		Conceptualizing Waste as a Resource: Urban Biosolids pProcessing in the Rural Landscape	Canadian Geographer	2018
Gregson, N., Crang, M., Fuller, S., and Holmes, H.		Interrogating the Circular Economy: The Moral Economy of Resource Recovery in the EU	Economy and Society	2015