Impossibility of a Fully Circular Economy Under Capitalism

Discussion

Matthew Thompson, Charlotte Cator et al. :

"Capitalism presents a structural limit to circularity conceived in this way. Even within bounded circular economies, the Second Law of Thermodynamics—demonstrating that any physical system based on inputs and outputs is entropic, slowly disorganising over time—suggests that a fully circular economy ‘has no relation to reality as revealed by biophysical metabolic analysis’ (Martinez-Alier, 2022: 1182). Indeed, ‘closing the loop’ is extremely difficult even for specific materials in particular sectors, with only slightly imperfect recovery rates for recycling materials creating exponential leakage or wastage over time, compounding with each cycle of recycling (Webster, 2021). This is exacerbated by capitalism’s tendency to ‘transform valuable matter and energy into waste’; and the reliance of this especially wasteful system on displacing or ‘exporting’ rather than resolving its ‘entropy problem’ (Moore, 2015: 84). This has serious implications for a circular discourse concerned with countering entropic wastage and underlines the deeply uneven global geography underpinning circular economy development.

Capitalism’s entropy problem derives from its utter dependency on Cheap Natures, understood as ‘free gifts’ (‘nature-as-tap’) and ‘free garbage’ (‘nature-as-sink’); ‘Every great movement of appropriating new streams of unpaid work/energy’, writes Moore (2015: 279), ‘implies a disproportionately larger volume of waste’, such that ‘[v]alue and waste are dialectically bound’. Gidwani and Maringanti (2016) articulate this bind as the ‘waste-value dialectic’ in which value, as a self-expansionary dynamic, depends upon ‘effaced, background labour’ (Corwin and Gidwani, 2021: 2) to do its ‘dirty work’, as well as upon sinks or dumping grounds for its poisons and pollutants, unwanted products and ‘surplus’ populations. Capital accumulation always relies on ‘sacrifice zones [of] wasted people and wasted places’ (Armiero, 2021: 2, 10). Around 15 million people, or 1% of the world’s urban population toils in informal waste work—mostly women, children, the elderly, and migrants—with an estimated 1 million ‘informal recyclers’ in Europe alone, double the figure employed formally in waste collection and processing (Irvine, 2023). This is ‘infra-structural labour’, both invisible and essential to capital (Corwin and Gidwani, 2021)—one important disavowed source, alongside non-human cheap natures, of capitalism’s continued profitability.

Capitalism’s continued profitability, however, is increasingly difficult to secure. A surge in commodity prices for rare-earth metals and other key raw materials led to the ‘commodity supercycle’ of 2003–7 (Arboleda and Purcell, 2021) and the ‘signal crisis’ (Moore, 2015) of financialised neoliberalism, exacerbating overaccumulation and precipitating the 2007–9 global financial crisis. With new commodity frontiers now either exhausted or increasingly contested, capitalism must turn to alternatives, reinvent itself, or risk collapse. No surprise, then, that the compelling yet contradictory idea of the ‘zero-waste circular economy’ as a perfect, self-sustaining loop—‘flawlessly circular and absolutely benign’ (Valenzuela and Böhm, 2017: 31)—is gaining ground as a hegemonic imaginary for renewing accumulation in the face of secular stagnation, and as a ‘moral economy’ justifying the EU’s geopolitical efforts to secure rare-earth and scarce resources (Gregson et al., 2015). Just as ‘net zero carbon’ discourses promulgate the fantasy of the decoupling of economic growth from carbon emissions without transforming capitalism itself (Buck 2021), so too does the zero-waste circular economy promote continued capital accumulation through the revalorisation of waste (Valenzuela and Böhm, 2017). Waste, then, becomes capitalism’s next commodity frontier through which the hegemonic project of capital’s indefinite expansion may be realised despite deepening world-ecological contradictions. In this way, the circular economy presents a potential “spatial fix” for neoliberalism’s overaccumulation crises (Conroy, 2022) while simultaneously providing an “urban sustainability fix” (Savini 2019, 2021) that secures cities’ entrepreneurial repositioning within the global economy.

A striking challenge to the zero-waste circular economy is presented by Moore’s world-ecological treatment of the role and function of waste in capitalism. Recently, Moore (2023: 16) has built on Armiero’s (2021) concept of the ‘Wasteocene’ to argue that the ‘accumulation of waste is a limit to capital’, perhaps the decisive socio-ecological limit of capitalism. Such a limit is relational rather than substantialist; waste is a dialectical process and site of struggle rather than material substance alone. The Wasteocene combines the two principal meanings of waste—‘as commons to be enclosed, as pollutants to be dumped’ (Moore, 2023: 16)—to suggest how capitalism is an unstable system predicated on expanding waste frontiers and ‘sacrifice zones’. These are capitalism’s spatial fix for its entropy problem: ‘These frontiers are not just places where capital shits’ but also ‘zones where capitalism’s entropy is exported’ (Moore, 2023: 28). Thus, capitalism is an especially entropic, wasteful system only made viable by virtue of its capacity to export entropy from core to periphery through colonial dependencies and uneven development—a kind of thermodynamic imperialism (Moore, 2023: 21, footnote 10).

Thus, the intensification of circularity in one city implies the export of entropic processes and displacement of waste frontiers and sacrifice zones elsewhere (both beyond and within the city). Whilst the aim of Amsterdam’s circular economy is to internalise and make circular—rather than export—its waste frontiers, Amsterdam’s circular industrial strategies for product reuse and recycling, as Savini (2019) has shown, are nonetheless dependent, contradictorily, on ever-increasing material through-flow and rising consumption. In other words, capitalist circularity is only made viable by a growing stream of waste to be processed profitably.1 If Amsterdam’s strategy ever comes close to realising zero-waste circularity—itself an extremely difficult proposition in the face of thermodynamic reality (Martinez-Alier, 2022)—any entropic wastage would, by definition, have to be exported; it would be compounded by the rising resource inputs required to maintain growth in the circular economy and which could only possibly be sourced, profitably under capitalism, from the wastage of people and places elsewhere.

If circular economy development is to avoid being an imperialist project of exporting entropy from core to periphery, then it must seek to make the entire global economy circular. This would mean the circular economy becoming capitalism’s next regime of accumulation centred around the capitalisation of (re)production processes and technologies for revalorising waste—in effect, turning waste frontier into commodity frontier. However, this is structurally limited, if not impossible, by the dialectical relationship Moore (2015) identifies between rising capitalisation and even faster rising appropriation; by ‘the centrality of frontier zones in counter-acting the tendency for the rate of profit to decline’ (Moore, 2023: 28); by the state-led colonisation of new frontier zones and ‘great waves of geographical restructuring’ (Moore, 2015: 100) enabling the periodic injection of cheap natures to offset capitalism’s falling rate of profit (see also Conroy, 2022).

Capitalism’s falling rate of profit and crisis tendencies are not only due to the contradictions between incentives to replace human labour with machines (to increase productivity) and structurally limited efforts to intensify exploitation of labour (the source of surplus value). These tendencies are also rooted in the falling fertility of non-human nature such as soil (the other original source of surplus value) and diminishing Ecological Returns on Investment (EROI) (see Martinez-Alier, 2022). Moore’s (2015) dialectical-monist world-ecological ‘double internality’ of ‘humanity-in-nature/nature-in-humanity’ can go only so far in explaining this; Foster’s (2000) dualist idea, building on Marx, of a ‘metabolic rift’ in society’s exchange with nature helps us understand in clearer terms what’s at stake in capital’s exhaustion of ecologies and its opening of irreparable and damaging disruptions to social metabolism (for more on metabolic rift theory, see McClintock, 2010 and; Genovese and Pansera, 2021).

The original metabolic rift in soil fertility forces capitalists to prop up falling EROI with technological subsidies—artificial petrochemical fertilisers, for instance—but which necessitate their own appropriations of cheap natures elsewhere, thereby scaling up and geographically displacing capitalism’s metabolic rift, for an expansive ricocheting process of global ‘rifts and shifts’, from the nitrogen cycle to the carbon cycle (McClintock, 2010). Moreover, technological subsidies produce rising toxifications and mutations, such as superweeds from genetic modification in industrial agriculture, such that surplus value depends upon ‘a disproportionately greater quantum of surplus pollution’ (Moore, 2023: 28). Moore’s (2023: 22) argument that ‘[f]or every commodity frontier, there must be a more expansive, and over time, more toxic, waste frontier’ suggests that attempts to commodify waste through the circular economy are fraught with paradox, presenting a structural limit to capital’s expansion. On the capitalist precepts of expanding surplus value, therefore, the idea of true, sustainable circularity—without entropic exports, toxic spillovers or expanding waste frontiers—flies in the face of material reality.

The fatal combination of rising toxifications and exhaustion of new commodity frontiers for plundering cheap natures—at least on this planet—suggests to Moore (2023: 30) that we are fast approaching ‘an epochal crisis of capitalism’, which ‘will give way to another model – or models – over the next century. Hence the centrality of the new ontological politics – of food sovereignty, climate justice, de-growth, and cognate movements’ (Moore, 2015: 29). This intriguing allusion to ‘the new ontological politics’ suggests another, alternative role for the circular economy: as an imaginary and set of prefigurative practices, alongside degrowth and doughnut economics, pointing towards a postcapitalist society. Moore argues that potentially revolutionary movements to ‘reclaim the commons’ are today approaching ‘a zero-sum contest with the forces of capital’, as new frontier zones are exhausted and the urban, agrarian, terrestrial and atmospheric commons are enclosed by capital, with nowhere left to colonise, on planet earth, at the scale required (Moore, 2023: 25). ‘Absent new frontiers’, writes Moore (2023: 30), ‘capital’s contradictions turn inwards, yielding an unprecedented onslaught of toxification and violence’, thereby escalating ‘ecological distribution conflicts’ (Martinez-Alier, 2022).

Reflecting the conclusions of similar critiques mounted from different theoretical angles (Genovese and Pansera, 2021; Siderius and Zink, 2023), all this places the circular economy at a contradictory crossroads, torn between opposing trajectories: one towards commodification, as a spatial fix for uneven capitalist entropy; the other, decommodification, as part of a new ontological politics. Perhaps no other city illustrates this dilemma so acutely as Amsterdam."

(https://academic.oup.com/cjres/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cjres/rsae022/7710625?login=false)