circular economy

This commentary is part of a series initially presented at the Waste/Economies/Ecology hybrid international symposium at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia in February 2023. The symposium was part of the research project ‘Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy’funded by the Australian Research Council. The symposium brought together academics and artists from around the world who are thinking with waste to enable novel responses to its ethical and political challenges.

This commentary is part of a series initially presented at the Waste/Economy/Ecology hybrid international symposium at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia in February 2023. The symposium was part of the research project ‘Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy’funded by the Australian Research Council. The symposium brought together academics and artists from around the world who are thinking with waste to enable novel responses to its ethical and political challenges.

Community and charitable reuse organisations provide significant social infrastructure that facilitates the redistribution of discarded items to new owners, but are often overlooked in circular cities initiatives. Drawing on a survey of 34 reuse organisations from across Australia and recorded interviews and site visits to 10 of these between 2021 and 2023, we characterise the processes, practices and types of organisations across the sector.

This paper examines the circular economy’s application in addressing sustainability challenges, focusing on organic waste and peri-urban futures. Critically reflecting on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s definition of circularity, we explore how waste minimization and ecosystem regeneration align with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) like climate action and responsible production. Realising this more ambitious and transformational version of circularity involves us in a process of redrawing the “circle” and in the process reimagining economies.

This chapter proposes to recast the “supply chain” as a commons via an extended description of the shared social, intellectual, and regulatory resources currently producing an experiment in a circular economy for organic waste in Sydney, Australia. Organic waste, once composted, finds its way into high value-added crops like heirloom garlic which are then sold back to consumers in Sydney.

Circular economy initiatives in Australia increasingly reference reuse, yet dominant recycling-led approaches continue to reproduce business-as-usual. This paper asks what kinds of worlds are made through reuse by examining Substation 33 and St Kilda Mums (now Our Village). Drawing on Karatani’s reading of surplus value, we develop “reuse value” as a parallax concept that captures both the embodied potential of discarded materials and the relational forms of care through which they re-enter circulation.