Circular economies are often framed as addressing a trio of problems: environmental degradation, economic stagnation, and social ills, broadly defined. Our paper centers on this last claim – that circular economies promise social benefits. There is a dearth of literature focused on the social dimensions of circular economies (Geissdoerfer, Martin, Paulo Savaget, Nancy M. P. Bocken, and Erik Jan Hultink. 2017. “The Circular Economy – A New Sustainability Paradigm?” Journal of Cleaner Production 143 (February): 757–768. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.12.048.), and even less attention to the meaning of social justice in the context of circular economies, let alone how it might be enacted in policy and practice. Drawing on data generated from focus groups with circular economy experts and a content analysis of US-based governmental, NGO, and business literature on circular economies, we explore whether and how justice emerges in circular economy discourse. We explore the narratives that these actors use to describe justice, and the barriers they see in achieving just and inclusive circular economies. We aim to identify the ways in which social justice is defined and discussed – or not – by the actors who seem to be most actively pushing for a circular economy (CE). Our work addresses the critical need to articulate clearly what it is we mean by social justice in relation to the CE. For if the CE is to contribute to sustainable social transformations, justice must be more than a buzzword – the CE must be just by design.

This book traces the struggle to reconcile ideas and practices related to market growth, on the one hand, and sociocultural change, on the other, that exists within the U.S. organic foods sector. Using a multi-level, qualitative approach, it examines how sector members engage with these ideas and practices during their day-to-day activities, as well as during periods of institution building and sector-level change. It uses interviews conducted by the author with sixty organic foods businesspeople, regulators, and advocates, as well as a wide range of archival sources, to describe how sector members have promoted intrasectoral conflict by emphasizing differences between these understandings and how they strive for compromise by highlighting points of convergence. Substantively, this text explains how the compromises that existed during the organic sector’s early years dissolved into conflicts related to federal organic foods regulations, and it also documents the interrelated contemporary strategies of newly arrived organic foods businesspeople, activist critics of market growth, and countercultural co-op store leaders. At a theoretical level, the book makes use of sociological and organizational scholarship about institutional logics to construct an analytic frame for research about fields that are divided between conflicting understandings of purpose and different imagined future trajectories. It also pushes the institutional logics approach further by explaining how the social mechanisms of cultural framing and organizational/institutional work mediate between contradictory logics and processes of conflict and compromise.

Drawing on research with food waste recycling facilities in New England, this paper explores a fundamental tension between the eco-modernist logics of the circular economy and the reality of contemporary waste streams. Composting and digestion are promoted as key solutions to food waste, due to their ability to return nutrients to agricultural soils. However, our work suggests that food waste processors increasingly find themselves responsible for policing boundaries between distinct “material” and “biological” systems as imagined by the architects of the circular economy—boundaries penetrable by toxicants. This responsibility creates significant problems for processors due to the regulatory, educational, and structural barriers documented in this research. This paper contributes to scholarship which suggests the need to rethink the modernist logics of the circular economy and to recognize the realities of entangled material and biological systems. More specifically, we argue that if circularity is the goal, policy needs to recognize the barriers food waste processors face and concentrate circularity efforts further upstream to ensure fair, just, and safe circular food systems.

This article examines the economic and political forces that shape the characteristics of jobs in the meatpacking industry and assesses worker- and consumer-based strategies to improve pay and working conditions. I analyze one example of each strategy: first, the mid-twentieth century United Packinghouse Workers of America labor union and second, ongoing efforts to create a social justice certification program for kosher meat products. I argue that neoliberal patterns of economic organization and policy have undercut labor unionism and supported consumer-based strategies, but that these latter strategies have a limited potential to restructure power relations in the meatpacking industry and may even contribute to market fragmentation and worker exclusion. These programs are contradictory in their effort to use market mechanisms to resolve the exploitative conditions created by the market, and they raise important questions about the relationship between political rights and economic democracy in contemporary American society.

With growing awareness of the environmental, economic, and social costs associated with food waste, there is a concerted effort on multiple scales to recover the nutrient value of discarded food. These developments are positive, but the rapid movement toward alternatives and the complexity of solving problems located at the intersection of economic, social, and environmental systems also have the potential to produce unanticipated risks. This paper draws upon long-term stakeholder-engaged research throughout New England, with a focus on Maine, to develop a transdisciplinary, systems-based model of the potential social, economic, and environmental risks of food waste nutrient cycling. Our effort is intended to help inform the creation of safe, functional, and environmentally benign circular food systems.