Not All Circular Futures Are Green: On Ecological Transitions, Militarism, and Autarky
(Originally presented at the Politics, Ontologies and Ecologies Workshop, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, October 2025)
Oct 31, 2025
The circular economy has become one of the most celebrated policy frameworks of our age. It is invoked by corporations, governments, and international institutions as a pragmatic, optimistic strategy. A way to reconcile economic development with ecological survival.
We are told that by keeping materials in use, by closing loops, we can “decouple” growth from environmental impact.
But what if circularity isn’t the rupture we imagine?
What if it is simply the latest mutation of capitalism’s survival instinct?
Circular Economy as Ideology
In my recent work with Ben Lowe, we argued that the mainstream, ecomodernist, circular economy is underpinned by a very particular theory of value, one inherited from mainstream economics.
Circularity, we noted, often translates into value retention or value recovery, where what counts as “value” remains what can be monetised: materials, efficiency gains, productivity.
In this sense, circularity reproduces the same growth logic it claims to transcend.
The circular economy operates as a “passive revolution”: a reform from above that absorbs ecological critique while leaving the foundations of capital accumulation intact.
It becomes a new language of continuity. Not of rupture.
Circularity without a rethinking of value remains linear in its logic.
From Green Growth to Circular Sovereignty
In the last few years, circularity has undergone a subtle but decisive transformation. It has moved from being an environmental policy framework to becoming a tool of industrial and geopolitical strategy.
Consider the EU Critical Raw Materials Act (2023). At first glance, it looks like a classic circularity text: recycling targets, repair incentives, waste prevention.
But the Act’s underlying language is about security, resilience, and autonomy.
It positions circularity as a means of ensuring “strategic sovereignty” — reducing Europe’s dependence on imports of lithium, cobalt, rare earths, and other critical inputs from China and Russia.
Each Member State must now adopt national circularity programmes, map new extractive waste sites, and even create databases of “urban mines.”
Waste becomes reclassified as strategic reserve.
This is not post-growth.
It is reindustrialisation by other means.
Circularity becomes the logistics of an autarkic effort.
The Return of Extractivism
There is an irony here. In the name of circularity, we are reactivating extractive practices inside Europe itself. And besides from new extractive projects (which, under the Critical Raw Materials Act, can now be fast-tracked) old mining tailings, slag heaps, and abandoned facilities are being remobilised as “secondary deposits.”
We call it recycling, but it’s closer to retro-extraction — an internal frontier of resource security.
This shift is emblematic of what I call “circular sovereignty”: an ecological vocabulary used to legitimise a new wave of techno-nationalist industrial policy.
A scenario that resembles very closely what we described as “Fortress” or “Autarkic” Circularity in another recent paper of ours.
And it is not only Brussels that speaks this language.
Circularity Goes to War
In 2022, NATO adopted its Sustainability and Climate Change Framework.
At first sight, it reads like a standard sustainability plan:
emission reductions, energy efficiency, resource management.
But the logic is different.
NATO’s framework links circularity to operational resilience.
Repair, reuse, modularity, and energy recapture are framed as tools for military preparedness. The goal is not to reduce material throughput, but to ensure that operations can continue under disruption.
This is “sustainability” in the service of continuity — circular logistics for perpetual war.
The same logic is visible in several concept notes shared by Ministries of Defence of many nation states. “Circular logistics” pilots refurbish vehicles and reuse components across multiple theatres.
The objective is to make the military supply chain more adaptive, not more ecological.
Circularity becomes a logistics doctrine.
An instrument of control over matter, energy, and flow.
Rebound Effects and the Myth of Efficiency
The contradiction is visible even in the civilian domain. In recent work (Genovese et al., 2024), we examined rebound effects in circular supply chains: how efficiency gains and material recovery often lead to more consumption, not less.
Refurbished electronics, for example, reduce e-waste but multiply freight movements as devices are shipped back and forth across continents.
The carbon savings are erased by logistics intensity.
These rebounds are not market “failures.”
They are structural outcomes of an economy whose fundamental aim remains expansion.
Circular business models do not displace primary production; they coexist with it, offering new market niches and “green” value propositions that grow the pie rather than shrink it.
Logistics and Control
In this light, logistics emerges as the hidden architecture of the circular economy.
It is logistics that binds circular systems —
the flows of materials, goods, and waste, the circulation of products and their returns, the reverse loops that sustain consumption.
But logistics also reveals circularity’s paradox:
Efficiency gains at the micro level do not translate into macro sustainability.
What they do achieve is resilience — not ecological, but operational resilience.
And this is precisely why corporations and states are so invested in circularity today: it’s not about saving the planet, but about maintaining continuity in a world of ecological and geopolitical turbulence.
Circular Economy as Passive Revolution
Seen from this perspective, the circular economy is not a post-capitalist horizon. It is capitalism’s adaptive strategy under planetary stress.
It translates the language of limits into the grammar of efficiency.
It absorbs the critique of growth and converts it into new forms of value extraction.
And increasingly, it merges with the logic of security, resilience, and control.
Circularity has become the ideology of managed decline.
A world in which we no longer imagine transformation — only optimisation.
Toward Another Circularity
But there is still another path.
One that links circularity to democratic planning, to collective sufficiency, and to public control of production.
A circularity not of efficiency, but of justice.
A circularity that closes loops not for sovereignty, but for solidarity.
For now, however, most of what passes as circular economy serves the logistics of power, not the ecology of care.
Not all circular futures are green.
