Content area
Full Text
Abstract: Understanding the circular economy (CE) is vital for sustainable innovation. By realizing cyclic material flows in a market context, CE can prevent environmentally harmful take-make-dispose market-outcomes. However, theoretical endeavors in CE have focused on conceptualizing material flows on a system level without the theoretical understanding of the link between materials and economic activity. This is a detrimental gap, as the CE literature explicitly expresses the aim of linking economic behavior to material flows and their environmental outcomes. We structure this link by theorizing why materials flow in the market by building on the literature in sociology, economics, and marketing. We explain the materials to flow with the process between human and non-human actors, leading to material-resource or material-waste conversions. Based on these conversions, we build a model for materials in economic agency and show why material conversions render the well-established dichotomy of linear and circular flows meaningless in a market context.
Keywords: Circular economy; materials; material flows; resources; economic agency; value creation; economics; market
1Introduction
In the last decade, the Circular Economy (CE) has emerged as a prominent approach to carbon neutrality (Türkeli et al., 2018), resource efficiency (Ghisellini, Cialani and Ulgiati, 2016), industrial ecology (Zaoual and Lecocq, 2018), and as an overall framework for the global transition to sustainability (Hopkinson et al., 2018). CE aims to conceptualize systems of material use where, instead of ecologically unsustainable linear extract-produce-use-dump material and energy flows (Frosch and Gallopoulos, 1989), the flows are organized in a cyclical way, preventing the excessive dump and thereby diminishing the long-term cost to the natural environment (Korhonen, Honkasalo and Seppälä, 2018). As implied by the concept itself, the CE literature explicitly expresses the aim of understanding material flows in the context of economic activity (see, e.g., Kirchherr, Reike and Hekkert, 2017; Murray, Skene and Haynes, 2017; Prieto-Sandoval, Jaca and Ormazabal, 2018) characterized by resource integration and value creation through the act of exchange (Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2016). However, by far, theoretical endeavors in CE have focused on conceptualizing material flows in economic systems (e.g., reduce, reuse, recycle, repair, refurbish, remanufacture, repurpose, recover; Reike, Vermeulen and Witjes, 2018), leaving the link between flows and economic activity unaddressed. Considering the explicitly expressed aim of CE, this is a detrimental gap.
In...