The Circular Economy (CE) represents a new paradigm that is capable of pushing the frontiers of sustainable development by transforming the relationships between ecological systems and economic activities. Such a new paradigm is expected to repair economy-society-nature interactions, replacing the current linear economic model with a new one that is restorative and regenerative by intention and design; the core idea is that, rather than discarding products that can be potentially reused or recycled, they should be re-employed in a cascade of subsequent or feedback uses . Such a shift is anticipated to mark an industrial transformation based on different product design and end-of-life strategies intending to narrow, slow, and close material and energy loops . Going beyond the sole pursuit of waste prevention and reduction, CE aims to inspire technological, organisational, and social innovation across and within supply chains fundamentally transforming the way our economic systems operate. Also, CE has been pushed into public discourse with media devoting increasing attention to it. This has been accompanied by several attempts by national governments and international economic policy bodies to develop strategies for the implementation of CE practices at micro (company), meso (eco-industrial parks) and macro (city, region, nation) levels. At the European Union (EU) level, these attempts have culminated in the adoption of ‘Circular Economy Action Plan’ by the European Commission in March 2020. Constituting one of the main building blocks of the European Green Deal, the proposed directives in the plan are aimed at closing the loop of product life cycles through greater recycling and reuse, with the objective of bringing benefits for both the environment (fostering energy savings and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and promoting resource use efficiency) and the economy (boosting the promotion of green jobs), by decoupling economic growth from environmental degradation. However, while there is common agreement that the transition towards a CE could foster more sustainable futures, there is a lack of discussion about how a truly (viable, feasible, and desirable) circular economic system should be organised. Most of the current literature on CE fails to recognise this, presenting the transition towards a CE as a straightforward, neutral, and apolitical process, implicitly characterised by a techno-optimistic and eco-modernist stance .
Within this context, this project calls for opening up a debate to deconstruct the increasingly hegemonic discourse of CE based on a technocratic approach and reconstruct it by embedding normative and political dimensions, looking at a plurality of plausible CE futures, and discussing their implications in terms of the organisation of production and distribution networks, also involving a wide set of stakeholders.
