The Contested Circle – Part 5: The Mandate of Justice: Governance, Labor, and the Equitable Framework
The Unspoken Cost of Circulation
The Circular Economy (CE) is widely championed as a pathway to a sustainable and equitable future, promising significant job creation and environmental protection. However, critics argue that the mainstream agenda, often dominated by technical and economic accounts, has a critical blind spot concerning social and environmental justice (EJ/SJ). The focus on material flows and efficiency metrics frequently overlooks how the costs and benefits of circularity are distributed, creating an ethical and governance imperative that must be proactively addressed.
The complexity of resource recovery often relies heavily on vulnerable labor populations. The pursuit of resource efficiency risks formalizing the exploitation of workers in resource recovery sectors if equitable labor standards are not integrated. Therefore, if the CE is to realize its legitimacy as an ethical and sustainable system, policy must evolve from solely maximizing material circulation to actively ensuring the transition is just, concrete, inclusive, and transparent.
The Thesis of Equitable Governance: Beyond Metrics and Materials
The core thesis for a mature circular economy is that material and technical success is insufficient; a genuinely resilient and sustainable system requires a governance mandate focused on equity and inclusion. This means that policy frameworks must explicitly evaluate and mitigate the impacts of circular interventions on local communities, labor rights, and global fairness, ensuring that the economic gains generated are not subsidized by vulnerable workers or disproportionately borne by marginalized populations. This intentional policy shift must integrate social metrics, empower local actors, and actively phase out mechanisms that perpetuate environmental injustice internationally.
The Analytical Core: Mechanism, Theory, and the Iron Law of Physics
The Social Justice Crisis in Resource Recovery
Labor Vulnerability in the Circular Value Chain
The shift toward resource recovery—jobs in waste management, repair, and reuse—is a cornerstone of CE employment strategy, projected to create up to 700,000 jobs in the EU by 2030.
Yet, research reveals significant labor vulnerabilities within these high-potential sectors.
In the waste sector, workers frequently operate in high-risk environments and are compelled to work long hours. The reuse sector often involves manual labor and includes a large segment of informal workers who receive less protection under existing labor law. This includes occupations like salvaging, saving, repairing, and reuse, often undertaken by socially marginalized groups. The COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted this precarity, as essential workers such as waste pickers frequently lacked formal recognition and institutional support.
Critiques emphasize that a circular economy can bring with it prosperity, but also make life worse for many, creating winners and losers. The governance challenge is to ensure that the actual and perceived societal benefits are established through a more fundamental and sound manner than relying only on traditional cost-benefit analysis, which is insufficient for describing transformation at a systems level.
The Need for Intentional Inclusion
Achieving equitable job creation requires intentional policies rather than relying solely on market forces. Policy frameworks must promote robust social safety nets and targeted retraining programs to mitigate negative impacts on workers displaced from linear industries.
Furthermore, the mainstream CE literature has been criticized for a notable lack of inclusion from indigenous discourses and communities in the Global South, despite these groups having thousands of years of experience implementing circular solutions, such as regenerative agricultural practices. This exclusion risks recreating anthropocentric and ethnocentric ideas rooted in “westernized environmental discourses,” undermining the potential for truly ecocentric regeneration. The transition requires incorporating local knowledge and focusing on community-based approaches to manage resources, moving beyond purely corporate-led models.
The Crucible of Context: International Trade and Environmental Justice (EJ)
Transboundary Pollution and Policy Gaps
International cooperation is crucial for an international circular economy, especially to address transboundary issues like the trade of waste and the harmonization of environmental standards. However, the current global system risks exacerbating environmental injustice. The export of electronic waste, for example, often ships toxic additives and hazardous substances to developing countries, leaking into the informal sector and exposing local populations to significant health risks such as cancers and neurological damage.
A consideration of Environmental Justice (EJ) and Social Justice (SJ) is therefore critical to minimize the negative impacts of circular technology deployment on local communities. This requires establishing frameworks to evaluate the implications for human health, access to clean water, air quality, and job quality in specific geographic locations where new recycling facilities or resource recovery centers are located.
The policy challenge is clear: policies must actively address these issues by promoting fair trade practices, strengthening environmental regulations in developing nations, and supporting local capacity building to ensure the equitable distribution of benefits. The goal should be to shift the policy mandate from domestic resource management to actively serving as an international guardian of EJ.
Policy Fragmentation and Lock-Ins
The implementation of CE policy is often undermined by institutional and governance challenges, specifically policy fragmentation and inconsistency. Varying regulations on product design and waste management create confusion, hindering the development of predictable circular value chains and cross-border trade of secondary materials.
The European Union, recognized as a global leader in circularity policy, has attempted to overcome this fragmentation through the Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP). The CEAP, adopted in 2015, mapped out 54 legislative and non-legislative actions,
including updated waste legislation, the European Strategy for Plastics, and the Ecodesign Working Plan. The CEAP aimed to decouple resource consumption from economic growth, reduce import dependency, and stimulate job creation. All 54 actions were implemented or adopted by 2019, encouraging numerous member states and regions to develop their own circular economy strategies.
Cascade of Effects: Accountability Through Metrics
The Shift from Mass to Value
Effective transition and equitable outcomes require reliable, standardized metrics to track performance, guide investment, and hold entities accountable. Simple mass-based measurements (like tonnes recycled) are insufficient; metrics must capture both the quantity and the quality of material flow and product utility—the principle of circulating products at their “highest value”.
Sophisticated tools have been developed to measure this shift in focus:
Material Circularity Indicator (MCI): This quantitative index assesses product design circularity by combining inputs of virgin versus recycled materials, the product’s intended lifespan, and the unrecoverable waste generated. A higher MCI score indicates a stronger circular business model and better resource efficiency.
Circulytics: This comprehensive framework is designed for organizational self-assessment, evaluating the overall circular maturity of a business across two key categories: Enablers (internal readiness, strategy, skills) and Outcomes (material performance, services, energy). Tools like Circulytics are vital because they shift accountability from waste diversion to proactive product design for durability and utility over time.
National/System-Level Metrics: Tools like the Circularity Gap Metric provide a high-level overview of material flows at the global or national scale, helping governments track performance over time, benchmark, and guide resource allocation. National frameworks transform generalized aspirations into targeted, data-driven governance.
Conclusion: The Blueprint for an Equitable System
The Circular Economy holds the promise of achieving massive climate mitigation and economic stability, yet its current trajectory is fraught with risks of greenwashing and social inequality. To avoid becoming a “hypothetico-normative utopia” that undermines actual well-intended efforts, the CE must undergo a radical shift in its ethical and political focus.
The pathway toward robust circularity requires policy that is modest, concrete, inclusive, and transparent. This means enforcing a design-driven mandate through updated Ecodesign directives and strengthened Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes that incentivize high-value circulation (repair and remanufacturing) over low-value recycling. Critically, governmental and institutional actors must institutionalize social and environmental justice principles into governance frameworks. This requires explicit labor protection for workers in resource recovery sectors and eliminating international mechanisms that facilitate the export of waste and pollution to vulnerable communities. The future success of the circular economy relies on its ability to truly respect both planetary and social limits.