Infrastructuring the Circular Economy

Abstract

The circular economy (CE), and its focus on the cycling and regeneration of resources, necessitates both a reconfiguration of existing infrastructures and the creation of new infrastructures to facilitate these flows. In urban settings, CE is being realized at multiple levels, from within individual organizations to across peri-urban landscapes. While most attention in CE research and practice focuses on organizations, the scale and impact of many such efforts are limited because they fail to account for the diversity of resources, needs, and power structures across cities, consequently missing opportunities for adopting a more effective and inclusive CE. Reconfiguring hard infrastructures is necessary for material resource cycling, but intervening in soft infrastructures is also needed to enable more inclusive decision-making processes to activate these flows. Utilizing participatory action research methods at the intersection of industrial ecology and design, we developed a new framework and a model for considering and allocating the variety of resources that organizations utilize when creating value for themselves, society, and the planet. We use design prototyping methods to synthesize distributed knowledge and co-create hard and soft infrastructures in a multi-level case study focused on urban food producers and farmers markets from the City of Chicago. We discuss generalized lessons for "infrastructuring" the circular economy to bridge niche-level successes with larger system-level changes in cities.

From Sustainable Global Value Chains to Circular Economy—Different Silos, Different Perspectives, but Many Opportunities to Build Bridges

“…Industrial symbiosis is one such strategic supply chain approach in which organizations develop linkages with those in unrelated industries to use their by-products or share in the management of utilities or other infrastructure [ 58 ]. Partnerships with businesses in different industries as well as with governments, non-governmental organizations, or academics depend on building trust to overcome the lack of familiarity across distinct sectors and the creation of new cultural norms to harmonize different objectives and ways of working [ 59 ]. Research is needed to explore the effectiveness of various strategies for information-sharing and long-term relationship building across diverse organizations.…”

“…However, many other resources are used in any organization’s activities and need to be explicitly recognized to value them. By considering capital as any resource capable of producing other resources [ 60 ], organizations can evaluate the stocks, flows, depletion, and regeneration of various types of capital through their activities [ 59 ]. Digital capital, information infrastructure, and data are essential to successfully operate any business today.…”

iZindaba Zokudla: A conversation about food systems change in South Africa

“…118, 125). Facilitation and events enable people's agency to influence deeper processes (Nogueira et al, 2020). Cross-society interaction can subvert differences among people (Anderson & McLachlan, 2015) and build "bridges" between knowledge systems by "layering" different kinds of knowledge and interests alongside each other.…”

“…These shifts in the university fortuitously linked IZ to its current entrepreneurial focus. Ancillary and unplanned activities parallel to mainstream interventions do emerge from social labs as actors use such workshops for their own projects (Nogueira et al, 2020). This pluralizes activities and creates alternative avenues of action for participants that are important in safeguarding the autonomy of actors and stakeholders.…”

Achieving the Circular Economy: Exploring the Role of Local Governments, Business and Citizens in an Urban Context

“…Nogueira, Ashton, Teixeira, Lyon and Pereira's paper, "Infrastructuring the Circular Economy" [5], discusses the need to reconfigure both hard (material and tangible aspects) and soft infrastructure (institutions, intangible aspects, and social behavior) to achieve efficient material resource cycling. The authors develop a new framework and a model including the range of resources organizations utilize when creating value for the organization, society, or the planet.…”