Circular economies are often framed as addressing a trio of problems: environmental degradation, economic stagnation, and social ills, broadly defined. Our study 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, 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. Through this research, 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).

Drawing on data generated from focus groups with 15 CE experts and a content analysis of 23 US-based governmental, NGO, and business reports on circular economies, we explore whether and how justice emerges in the CE discourse. We examine the frequency and character of justice claims in the emerging US-based CE discourse, explore the narratives that these actors use to describe justice, and the barriers they see in achieving just and inclusive circular economies.

Our findings suggest that CE discussions in the United States have, to date, largely ignored explicit discussions of justice. Rather than an explicit focus on justice, reports include implicit assumptions of justice, which require close reading and discussion. Discourse that does include justice leans heavily toward neoliberal forms of justice, emphasizing the free pursuit of mutual self-interest, the protection of private property, and freedom of choice. We argue that this is insufficient to ensure a just CE for all. Indeed, there is ample evidence that without deep consideration of justice as a multifaceted concept (something that is achieved in process, in outcome, and by looking backward in time), movement toward more circular economies is likely to reproduce existing inequalities rather than to solve them.

We have proposed definitions of justice in the context of the CE in an effort to aid practitioners, policymakers, and scholars in demonstrating what we mean when we talk about justice in CE. Our analysis suggests how different dimensions of justice might be conceptualized within the context of circular economies. This work addresses the need to articulate clearly what it is we mean by social justice in relation to the CE, and fills a critical gap in the emergent literature on CE in the United States. 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.

Social capital has been consistently identified as a key component of community resilience. Social capital is the networks, norms, and trust that facilitate action and cooperation within communities for mutual benefit. The two main dimensions of social capital are bonding and bridging. Bonding refers to strong connections between similar individuals that use to belong to the same groups, and bridging refers to weak ties between heterogeneous people, but that are able to connect different groups. As online communities have developed, the concept of social capital has been split into online and offline social capital. Online social capital is based on bonding and bridging which happen in online communities, while offline social capital is more heavily based on in-person interactions.

Quantifying offline social capital at a population level is an area of ongoing work. Existing approaches to estimating offline social capital either utilize household surveys or aggregate indicators comprised of census data. Household surveys are time consuming and expensive, while population level indicators can aggregate over entire communities. By comparison, online social capital is very easy to measure, with numerous algorithms proposed which take in social media data and estimate bonding and bridging based on social networks and content. However, the question as to whether online and offline social capital are the same remains open.

In this ongoing research, we compare existing offline and online social capital indicators geographically across the US. We build a statistical model which predicts the difference between online and offline social capital using demographic, social, and economic covariates about each county in the US. We utilize interpretable machine learning techniques to assess model quality and how the covariates are associated with differences in online or offline social capital.

Our results indicate that measures of online and offline social capital differ from one another in a systematic way nationwide. Social vulnerability is one key driver of these differences for both bonding and bridging. In areas with high social vulnerability, online bonding is higher than offline bonding, but online bridging is lower than offline bridging. Additionally, homophily –the tendency for people to seek out those who are similar in socio-demographics – is associated with a difference between online and offline social capital. We find places with a higher level of homophily have lower measured online bonding social capital compared to offline.

Our preliminary conclusions from these results are that current measures of online and offline social capital are generally dissimilar from one another, raising questions about the efficacy of these indicators. By understanding the features driving these differences, we hope to improve future measures of quantifying social capital.

Interest in the circular economy in the context of the built environment continues to increase, however, systems-based approaches that support the integration of complex environmental, social, and economic aspects at the local scale are lacking. At the frontlines of waste management, communities are especially positioned to apply circular economy strategies, but are challenged with navigating prescriptive solutions that can be misaligned with their context-specific settings such as geography, economy and financial characteristics, existing infrastructure and related processes, and social and cultural qualities. To bridge the gap between top-down circular economy strategies and local operations, we are leveraging an integrated mixed methods approach called the Circularity Assessment Protocol (CAP), which synthesizes local, community-level data to inform actionable circular strategies guidance related to seven main spokes: input, community, material and product design, use, collection, end of cycle, and leakage, while also accounting for local policy, economic and governing foundations, and input from local stakeholders. Having previously been implemented in over 53 cities and 14 countries to investigate community-based plastic waste management, we aim to adapt the CAP framework to converge circularity across additional waste categories including the built environment. Here, we share our work-in-progress adaptation of the CAP for the construction and demolition (C&D) context and preliminary findings from a pilot application in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The framework encompasses data collection including literature search, field surveys, and qualitative approaches across various aspects of a community’s C&D material management infrastructure and processes ranging from geography, population, construction rates, C&D waste facilities, pollution and relevant policy initiatives. Outcomes from the pilot study will include a holistic evaluation and outlook for Pittsburgh’s C&D waste management strategy including identification of local producers and manufacturers of commonly used construction materials, rate of new construction relative to population growth, prevalence of green building design, thematic trends from stakeholder input, C&D waste generation rates, composition, and treatment outlets, demolition and deconstruction practices, and locations and profiles of C&D materials lost to the local environment via litter, illegal dumping, and abandoned materials or properties. Taken together we identify interconnections throughout the C&D material lifecycle in Pittsburgh and identify opportunities for local intervention strategies. Building on our experience applying the C&D CAP to Pittsburgh, we aim to illuminate local intervention strategies and further iterate on the CAP framework for expansion to other cities in the region and beyond for a collective widespread transition to the circular economy.

This paper presents a political-industrial ecology analysis of an emerging petrochemical corridor in Appalachia. Within Appalachia, various ethane “cracker” plants are under construction, or are being permitted, to transform ethane by-products from hydraulicly fractured shale gas in the Marcellus and Utica shales into plastics. Political-industrial ecology is a nascent field of geography that embeds resource metabolisms within their broader political economic contexts. I advance the field by presenting a “metabolic tour” of the petrochemical supply chain that analyzes how petrochemicals forge and transform human-environmental relationships along the chain. The political-industrial ecology analysis links these developments in the former steel belt to the growing environmental burdens of plastics, highlighting how record state subsidies are facilitating these linkages. Further, the systems perspective afforded by a political-industrial ecology view reveals three notable findings. First, the footprint of the corridor extends well beyond the Ohio River Valley to Canada, the US Gulf Coast and international markets in Europe and Asia. Second, the corridor is a significant step towards establishing more globally integrated markets for ethane and natural gas. Third, the analysis illustrates the myriad of environmental systems and communities interlinked through the corridor, which can serve as a roadmap for facilitating cumulative impact analysis, a key gap in environmental impact and justice scholarship.

Rising global temperatures and climate change are posing a threat to our food systems and impacting the resilience of both soils and communities, including in California’s Central Valley. In light of this, state and federal policies are pushing for increased diversion of food and organic waste from landfills to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, mitigate climate change and return valuable nutrients and carbon back to agricultural soils. These include both California Senate Bill 1383 and the US Food Loss and Waste Reduction Goal of 50% by 2030. As more organic waste is diverted from landfills and treated via anaerobic digestion (AD), a waste management strategy that produces both biogas (a source of renewable energy) and digestate (a nutrient-rich organic fertilizer), the production of food waste derived digestate (FWDD) will increase. The high volume of FWDD represents an opportunity to provide an affordable and sustainable alternative to fossil-derived fertilizer in urban agriculture, especially within historically underserved communities, which are disproportionately affected by a warming climate.

This research, led by the Latino Equity Advocacy and Policy Institute (LEAP) and the University of California, Davis, aims to: (1) demonstrate the applicability and social acceptability of FWDD as alternative liquid fertilizer in community learning gardens, (2) promote the resilience of healthy, carbon-rich soils as climate mitigation strategy in an urban agricultural context; and (3) build social resilience through nutritious, affordable, accessible and culturally relevant food produce in historically underserved communities. To achieve the aims mentioned above, this research sets out to grow major California crops in community learning gardens, using FWDD as alternative fertilizer to conventional synthetic fertilizers and fresh-market tomatoes as pilot crop. The sites are located within four communities in California’s San Joaquin Valley: Avenal, Huron, Kettleman City and Westside.

In the pilot stage, an optimal blend of FWDD and compost to be used as growing medium was developed, and phytotoxicity tests were conducted on tomato varietal to assess its viability. Following germination, tomato seedlings were transplanted into one of the four soil treatments: a) standard soil medium (e.g. vermiculite) and filtered water (negative control); b) standard soil medium, filtered water and conventional fertilizer (positive control); c) standard soil medium, filtered water and compost (compost-only treatment); and d) standard soil medium, compost and FWDD (compost-FWDD blend). Preliminary results based on plant growth metrics (plant height, aboveground biomass) and soil performance metrics show that FWDD nutrients are plant-available, and that there is no phytotoxicity at this application rate.

This research ultimately aims to deliver social, environmental and economic benefits to the communities listed above. By demonstrating the use of FWDD as organic fertilizer, it will enable community members to incorporate more sustainable, accessible and co-created growing practices, creating awareness of the benefits of closed-loop urban nutrient cycling and increasing food resilience in urban agriculture.