Circular Economy Under Fire: New Study Says Its Defenders Are Guarding the Paradigm, Not Testing It

The circular economy has become one of the most seductive ideas in modern sustainability thinking: keep materials in loops, design out waste, and somehow keep growing the economy at the same time. Over the past decade it has swept through policy ministries, corporate boardrooms and thousands of academic papers, promising to reconcile resource scarcity, climate change and continued prosperity in a single elegant framework. But a new critique published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology argues that when prominent defenders of the concept respond to their critics, they are doing something subtler than answering objections. According to Marjan Marjanović of the University of Lausanne, the most influential defences of the circular economy are carefully managed exercises in damage control, designed to preserve the concept’s optimism, political marketability and expert-led authority rather than genuinely test its limits.

The paper examines two recent, high-profile contributions led by Julian Kirchherr, one of the most cited scholars in the field: an essay asking whether the circular economy is a failing sustainability paradigm, and a broader systematic defence of the concept against its critics. Both texts concede a remarkable amount. They admit that the circular economy is embedded in existing economic systems, that mainstream policy uptake favours marginal tinkering and easily measured victories, and that the appeal of the concept lies partly in its win-win optimism. Yet Marjanović’s central claim is that these concessions are folded back into a defence of feasibility, patience and incrementalism, so that the paradigm’s structural limitations are acknowledged but never allowed to destabilise it.

The first and deepest problem, the critique argues, is that the defences reproduce an eco-modernist vision of sustainability in which the goal is to sustain economic growth while reducing environmental harm through better design, efficiency and circular business models. In this framing, firms and markets sit at the centre of the transition: companies are asked to cooperate across industries, adapt their business models and build circular infrastructure, while governments mainly enable these processes and consumers supply market signals through their purchases. Questions of redistribution, labour, ownership, sufficiency and democratic control are pushed to the margins. When critics point out that the circular economy aligns with corporate interests, the defenders respond that the field is now increasingly dominated by academics. Marjanović counters that this conflates the production of knowledge with the distribution of power, especially since academia itself is entangled with industry through funding, advisory roles and pressure to produce commercially useful research.

A second, politically charged issue is what the critique calls depoliticisation. Rather than refuting specific criticisms, the defences recast critical scholarship itself as a potential hazard, warning that overly critical perspectives can undermine legitimacy, deter investment and ultimately entrench the linear economy. Critique is tolerated only insofar as it remains grounded and proportionate. Marjanović argues this gets the relationship between criticism and progress exactly backwards: because the circular economy is a contested political discourse that shapes which actors are empowered and which trade-offs are obscured, systematic scrutiny is not a threat to momentum but one of its essential preconditions. Recent work on so-called agonistic circularity, which shows that contestation can produce more plural and robust forms of governance, suggests that disagreement is not external to circular transition but constitutive of it.

The treatment of systemic change illustrates the pattern. When critics argue that the circular economy ignores deep structural transformation, the defenders reply that systemic concepts underpin the field and that circularity has long been conceived as a whole-of-economy model. But, Marjanović notes, a concept can be systemic in scope without being transformative in substance: addressing the whole economy is not the same as challenging the property regimes, growth imperatives and unequal power structures through which that economy is organised. Similarly, the argument that the circular economy is wholly predicated on incrementalism effectively redefines the terms of judgment, so that modest, institutionally convenient and highly measurable shifts count as success while more radical demands are pushed outside the frame of what the concept is supposed to deliver. The bar is lowered, and then the paradigm is declared successful on its own reduced terms.

The critique also takes aim at the evidential basis of the defences. One paper is explicitly framed as a perspective piece with no original research data, while the other claims to offer a systematic synthesis of critiques, yet both make expansive claims about the field’s maturity, coherence and progress on the basis of selective literature synthesis, definitional reviews and chosen case examples. The handling of degrowth is a case in point: the mere existence of degrowth-related discussion is presented as proof that the circular economy is no longer fundamentally growth-oriented, even though by the defenders’ own figures, degrowth and economic sufficiency appeared in only around eleven to sixteen per cent of circular economy definitions in 2023. The presence of a minority post-growth strand, Marjanović argues, does not show that the field has overcome its growth attachment; if anything, the minority status of degrowth reinforces the critique that radical interpretations remain peripheral to the dominant, business-centred logic.

The response to criticism of the circle metaphor follows a similar pattern. The defenders argue that the metaphor is not misleading because serious scholars do not aim for perfect circularity and influential conceptualisations already acknowledge leakage and trade-offs. But this shifts the discussion from the effects of the metaphor to the intentions of scholars. The original criticism concerns what the circle does in public and policy imaginaries: it can naturalise the image of closure, encourage the fantasy of neat loops and obscure the social and spatial displacements involved in material flows. The defenders themselves briefly concede that the seductive simplicity of the closed loop can obscure questions of justice and power, yet they do not engage that concern directly. A metaphor can be politically powerful, the critique insists, even when its users do not take it literally.

Beyond the circular economy itself, the paper turns a sharper lens on academic culture. The defenders criticise the field for metric-driven opportunism, repetitive reviews and low-quality scholarship, yet Marjanović observes that their own output leans heavily on opinion pieces, definitional reviews and meta-level commentary with little original data, complicating sweeping dismissals of other forms of academic production. They also promote a pracademic ideal, celebrating scholars who move between universities, consultancy and public debate, and praising applied reports by organisations such as the UN for their clarity. Marjanović does not deny the value of practitioner engagement, but argues that this model projects a narrow, elitist hierarchy of scholarly worth in which visibility, applicability and policy influence define value, while slower, less performative and more adversarial forms of critique are cast as excessive or marginal. Teaching, mentoring, methodological rigour and conceptual clarification, he notes, are also central academic contributions, and not all impact is publicly visible.

Perhaps the most pointed section concerns self-positioning. The two defences cite roughly twenty-six publications authored or co-authored by Kirchherr, mobilising his own prior work to define the field, establish its maturity, diagnose its problems and defend its significance. The recommendation that scholars publish in practitioner-oriented venues is illustrated with the Journal of Circular Economy, of which Kirchherr is Editor-in-Chief and co-author Kris Hartley an editorial board member. Marjanović is careful to note that this does not amount to a formal conflict of interest or prove bad faith, but he argues it reflects a deeper epistemic self-positioning: the authors are not merely reviewing the field but shaping the canon through which it is understood, so that the circular economy is defended partly through texts that define what counts as meaningful progress within it.

The critique ends on a conciliatory but firm note. The defenders are right that parts of the critical literature can be schematic and repetitive, that circular economy scholarship has grown more internally plural, and that institutional uptake matters politically. Yet internal plurality does not erase the dominance of growth-compatible interpretations, and the weaknesses of some critical work do not invalidate the need for critique as such. A genuinely convincing defence, Marjanović concludes, would need to show that the circular economy can engage seriously with power, labour, ownership, redistribution, wellbeing and sufficiency, rather than treating them as secondary matters of implementation and design. Until then, the debate over the circular economy is best understood not as a technical dispute about recycling rates, but as a struggle over who gets to define the concept, which critiques count as legitimate, and what kind of academic authority is permitted to shape its future.

Subject of Research: Critical analysis of normative bias, academic elitism and self-positioning in circular economy scholarship

Article Title: What defenders of the circular economy get right, and what they don’t: normative bias, academic elitism, and self-positioning in circular economy scholarship

Article References: Marjanović, M. (2026). What defenders of the circular economy get right, and what they don’t: normative bias, academic elitism, and self-positioning in circular economy scholarship. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 30(4), 2089-2099. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00141-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00141-w

Keywords: circular economy, sustainability, ecological modernisation, academic critique, degrowth, green growth, scholarly debate, Journal of Industrial Ecology, positionality, environmental policy, self-citation, pracademics