# Assistant conversation YE7TS8 - Canonical URL: - Resource IRI: - Type: assistant conversation - Mode: quick ## Transcript ### 1. User can you look at the mikael draft, the fieldwork notes etc too, and discuss this hypothesis : The dominant circular-economy framing evaluates initiatives like Brīvbode by throughput — tonnes diverted from landfill, items per visitor, percentage rerouted to textile collection. The metric is liquidity, velocity, the smoothness of the loop. By that standard a maximally efficient swapshop would be one where things barely touched the shelf before being absorbed by the next user — pure flow, minimal friction. But everything that makes Brīvbode actually Brīvbode, ethnographically, depends on friction ### 2. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `list_documents` ```json {} ``` ### 3. Tool result: list_documents - #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] - 2026 | Ieva Lange - #FYG32U Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] - 2026 | Ieva Lange Journal articles (91) - #QUD55H 'Saving' the city: Collective low-budget organising and urban practice - 2015 | Birke Otto, Hans Vollmer, Heike Derwanz, Paula Bialski | ephemera: theory & politics in organization | 20 pp. - #K52UPR A Critical Review of the Role of Repair Cafés in a Sustainable Circular Transition - 2021 | Mette Alberg Mosgaard, Rikke Marie Moalem | Sustainability | 26 pp. | doi:10.3390/su132212351 - #4EFC4F After Practice? Material Semiotic Approaches to Consumption and Economy [cited] - 2020 | David M. Evans | Cultural Sociology | 17 pp. | doi:10.1177/1749975520923521 - #9D34UM After taste: Culture, consumption and theories of practice - 2014 | Alan Warde | Journal of Consumer Culture | 25 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540514547828 - #5Y2AD9 An order of distinction (or, how to tell a collection from a hoard) - 2018 | Katie Kilroy-Marac | Journal of Material Culture | 19 pp. | doi:10.1177/1359183517729428 - #FQRNAE Austerity and everyday life: Perspectives on practices of consumption and thrift - 2019 | Alison Hulme | Journal of Consumer Culture | 7 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540519872079 - #9MNC8T Austerity Ireland, the New Thrift Culture and Sustainable Consumption - 2017 | Fiona Murphy | Journal of Business Anthropology | 17 pp. | doi:10.22439/jba.v6i2.5410 - #59QUM6 Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle [cited] - 2017 | Sally Eden | Journal of Consumer Culture | 21 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540515586871 - #X8QHRR Calculating the Environmental Impact Reduction Due to Extended Lifespan of Clothing Through Clothing Swaps - 2025 | Agnė Jučienė, Inga Gurauskienė, Jolita Kruopienė | Sustainability | 22 pp. | doi:10.3390/su17104411 - #AVNZLE Care and circularity: how the enactment of care enables and shapes the circular consumption of clothing [cited] - 2025 | Christian Fuentes, Réka Tölg | Consumption and Society | 19 pp. | doi:10.1332/27528499y2024d00000032 - #XUHRZA Changing understandings of waste reduction and avoidance in moralities of thrift: A comparison of Mass Observers' narratives three decades apart [cited] - 2022 | Helen Holmes, Ulrike Ehgartner | Geoforum | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.10.014 - #BQ2W57 Circular Consumption Practices as Matters of Care [cited] - 2025 | Elina Närvänen, Malla Mattila, Nina Mesiranta, Outi Koskinen | Journal of Business Ethics | 19 pp. | doi:10.1007/s10551-024-05888-5 - #57LWKZ Cities of care: A platform for urban geographical care research - 2020 | Emma R. Power, Miriam J. Williams | Geography Compass | 12 pp. | doi:10.1111/gec3.12474 - #JXXRQJ Citizen-Consumers as Agents of Change in Globalizing Modernity: The Case of Sustainable Consumption - 2010 | Gert Spaargaren, Peter Oosterveer | Sustainability | 22 pp. | doi:10.3390/su2071887 - #8ZKAT7 Closing the loop or squaring the circle? 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[cited] - 2021 | Dan Welch, Harald Wieser, Helen Holmes, Katy Wheeler, Kersty Hobson | Journal of Cleaner Production | 8 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128969 - #MNFABA Disposal and simple living: exploring the circulation of goods and the development of sacred consumption - 2009 | Hélène Cherrier | Journal of Consumer Behaviour | 14 pp. | doi:10.1002/cb.297 - #YBKS64 Everyday life after downshifting: Consumption, thrift, and inequality - 2020 | Jo Lindsay, Kim Humphery, Ruth Lane | Geographical Research | 15 pp. | doi:10.1111/1745-5871.12396 - #TBPJS6 Exploring the role of community-based enterprises in consumers' voluntary clothing disposition via UK swapping events using theory of social practice [cited] - 2023 | Aurelie Le Normand, Claudia E. 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AN INTRODUCTION - 2023 | Francisco Martínez, Tomás Errázuriz | Home Cultures | 15 pp. | doi:10.1080/17406315.2024.2347703 - #ZJUEY4 ‘It will Keep Circulating’: Loving and Letting Go of Things in Swedish Second-hand Markets - 2019 | Anna Bohlin | Worldwide Waste | 11 pp. | doi:10.5334/wwwj.17 - #VWPB2S ‘It's Kind of Saving them a Job isn't it?’ The Consumption Work of Household Recycling - 2015 | Kathryn Wheeler, Miriam Glucksmann | The Sociological Review | 19 pp. | doi:10.1111/1467-954x.12199 - #UTUMYN ‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care - 2012 | María Puig de la Bellacasa | The Sociological Review | 20 pp. | doi:10.1111/j.1467-954x.2012.02070.x - #EDFB5G “If I don’t do it, it feels wrong”: embodying environmental ethical reflexivity through cultivation and enactment of practices [cited] - 2024 | Anne Sofie Møller Askholm | Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy | 12 pp. | doi:10.1080/15487733.2024.2350204 - #3F4AVR “Still good life”: On the value of reuse and distributive labor in “depleted” rural Maine [cited] - 2020 | Brieanne Berry, Cindy Isenhour | Economic Anthropology | 16 pp. | doi:10.1002/sea2.12176 Books (20) - #GABXSA Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies - 1995 | Daniel Miller | 350 pp. - #UX42KU Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing [cited] - 2016 | Thomas Widlok | 240 pp. | doi:10.4324/9781315671291 - #VC6397 Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-hand Clothes - 2015 | Andrew Brooks | 298 pp. | doi:10.5040/9781350219243 - #8J3FXD Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality [cited] - 2003 | Elizabeth Shove | 236 pp. | doi:10.5040/9781474214605 - #2EDLQU Elusive Consumption - 2004 | Helene Brembeck, Karin M. 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Storing and storying the serendipity of objects - 2013 | Patrick Laviolette | Things in Culture, Culture in Things | Approaches to Culture Theory | pp. 13-33 | 11 pp. - #PB2Z6X Introduction: commodities and the politics of value [cited] - 1986 | Arjun Appadurai | The Social Life of Things | Cambridge University Press | pp. 3-63 | 31 pp. | doi:10.1017/CBO9780511819582.003 - #WMSENQ Sustainable consumption as a systemic challenge: inter- and transdisciplinary research and research questions - 2015 | Philip J. Vergragt, Sylvia Lorek | Handbook of Research on Sustainable Consumption | Edward Elgar Publishing | pp. 19-31 | 14 pp. | doi:10.4337/9781783471270.00008 - #V4V7XC Sustainable Consumption, Behaviour Change Policies and Theories of Practice [cited] - 2012 | Andrew McMeekin, Dale Southerton, David Evans | The Habits of Consumption | Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies | pp. 113-129 | 17 pp. - #BZ63DX Sustainable practices: social theory and climate change - 2013 | Elizabeth Shove, Nicola Spurling | Sustainable Practices | Routledge | pp. 17-30 | 22 pp. | doi:10.4324/9780203071052-6 - #Y3CFPX The Assembling of Circular Consumption: A sociomaterial practice approach - 2023 | Christian Fuentes, Elina Närvänen, Nina Mesiranta | The Routledge Handbook of Catalysts for a Sustainable Circular Economy | Routledge | pp. 535-549 | 15 pp. | doi:10.4324/9781003267492-30 - #9DHD6K The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process - 1986 | Igor Kopytoff | The Social Life of Things | Cambridge University Press | pp. 64-92 | 15 pp. | doi:10.1017/CBO9780511819582.004 - #3SKV2A The cultural dimension of sustainable consumption practices: an exploration in theory and policy - 2013 | Gert Spaargaren | Innovations in Sustainable Consumption | Edward Elgar Publishing | 13 pp. | doi:10.4337/9781781001349.00022 - #72GVQ9 The Habits of Consumption [cited] - 2012 | Alan Warde, Dale Southerton | The Habits of Consumption | Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies | pp. 1-25 | 25 pp. - #KWZ2A4 Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption [cited] - 2015 | Alan Warde, Daniel Welch | Handbook of Research on Sustainable Consumption | Edward Elgar Publishing | pp. 84-100 | 17 pp. | doi:10.4337/9781783471270.00013 - #Q8AKGZ Towards a Better Accounting of the Roles of Body, Things and Habits in Consumption - 2012 | Harold Wilhite | The Habits of Consumption | Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies | pp. 87-99 | 13 pp. Doctoral theses (3) - #QRRZP2 Consumption and Practice: Unfolding Consumptive Moments and the Entanglement with Productive Aspects - 2013 | Benjamin Julien Hartmann | 157 pp. - #ZC3PHV Patchworks of Care: Ethics and Practice of Care in the Organic Food Movement in Latvia - 2020 | Agnese Bankovska | 234 pp. - #8EVNK8 The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings - 2025 | Réka Tölg | 138 pp. Reports (1) - #XBPXDL Inconspicuous consumption: the sociology of consumption and the environment - 1998 | Alan Warde, Elizabeth Shove | 17 pp. Spreadsheet (1) - #XGCWS4 Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet ### 4. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `get_document` ```json { "id": "4V8VH7" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "query": "friction throughput flow circular economy metrics" } ``` ### 5. Tool result: get_document THESIS #4V8VH7 Title: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia Outline: - 1 #ZF9EYF Introduction - 1.1 #LAR465 Latvian context and research - 1.2 #MUKRGA A note on terms - 1.3 #FVXBEK The structure of the thesis - 2 #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework - 2.1 #Q2WXHP Theories of Practice - 2.2 #WULWDF Theories of Practice to Study Alternative Practices? - 2.3 #HQ4PZX Consumption practices - 2.4 #23NMLX Consumption Work - 2.5 #ULSUAX Conclusion - 3 #LYTS7L Research methodology: A Practice Freecycle - 3.1 #ZXRYYU The site - 3.2 #3CQF69 Setting the scene: A day in Brīvbode - 3.3 #U3GSXB Ethnography of Practice - 3.4 #VMQSHJ Participant observation - 3.5 #GU86TB Interviews - 3.6 #BRBBF9 Data analysis - 3.7 #TGAMBJ Research ethics - 4 #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation - 4.1 #2JEZWG Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home - 4.2 #PBFQ5E Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow - 4.3 #QP7HMF Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation - 4.4 #PZH45P Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange - 4.5 #7Z8WUY Letting Go: Attachment Without Price - 4.6 #W2WRDC What People Find Here: Plural Meanings of Acquisition - 4.7 #GTJY22 Quiet or Reflected Sustainability? - 4.8 #A3X9XX Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations - 5 #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode - 5.1 #N8D3HT Time to Give: Volunteers and the Sufficiency Lifestyle - 5.2 #SLFJ9K Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care - 5.3 #EBTHSE Not the Bin: Modal Labour and the Informal Route - 5.4 #L38KUE It’s On Me: Networks, Gender, and the Transmission of Care - 5.5 #75D5UH Conclusion - 6 #M9WQLY CONCLUSION - 7 #FTE3UX SUMMARY - 8 #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES - 9 #TY2EB4 KOKKUVÕTE ### 6. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices: socio-spatial transformations in the Circular City (#4AE86F), Kersty Hobson, p. 2 Context: #7TWE3G From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices: socio-spatial transformations in the Circular City #XUQXYU KEYWORDS Matching excerpt #KTYZJQ: practices; metrics on what constitutes circularity; as well as the increasing “circular-washing” of goods and services (as in “greenwashing”: see Correa et al., 2017). 2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode #75D5UH Conclusion Matching paragraph #RX9JDU: What Brīvbode reveals — and what makes it analytically valuable for circular economy debates — is that the absence of price does not produce a frictionless flow of materials. It produces a different kind of work: gendered, ethically motivated, absorbed into household routines, and sustained by people who have organised their lives to be able to do it. Recognising this work as both consumption work and care work is the first step toward circular economy policy that can see it, support it, and not depend on its invisibility. 3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #ZF9EYF Introduction Matching paragraph #J4M2WK: We live in a context of overproduction where managing the flow of things in households becomes both a practical and a moral problem. In the case of textiles in particular, large quantities of clothing circulate through markets at increasing speed while average use time continues to decline. Circular economy policies increasingly position reuse and extended product lifetimes as solutions, yet the success of it depends on everyday practices that are labour-intensive and socially uneven (Hobson et al. 2021). 4. Source: The Political Economy of Circular Economies: Lessons from Future Repair Scenario Deliberations in Sweden (#LB5ACW), Duncan McLaren, Johan Niskanen, p. 1 Context: #PA8RHN The Political Economy of Circular Economies: Lessons from Future Repair Scenario Deliberations in Sweden #Z2VAH4 Introduction Matching excerpt #AQCZ9W: In the dominant interests, at least in the West [4], circular economy is an eco-modernist technocratic concept [5, 6] resting on the idea that the current linear “extract-produce-use-dump material and energy flow model of the modern economic system is unsustainable” [7, p.37]. CE concepts posit that these unsustainable flows can be curbed and redirected by keeping services and products in use for longer and by reusing materials in new products and services over time. This can make for strange bedfellows where CE brings together environmental interests and heavy industry under a common umbrella of increased material circularity [8]. 5. Source: Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review (#PSBVW7), Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Juana Camacho-Otero, p. 0 Context: #HHKK3Q Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review Matching excerpt #N94NFW: Abstract: A circular economy (CE) aims at decoupling value creation from waste generation and resource use by radically transforming production and consumption systems. Recent reviews on the topic of the circular economy have indicated that cultural barriers are a significant factor hindering the diffusion of so-called ‘circular’ business models, particularly the lack of consumer—or user—acceptance. However, none of them has provided an overview of the existing literature addressing such issues that can help academics and practitioners better understand consumption considerations when addressing the circular economy. Motivated by these observations, this paper presents the results of a literature review that summarises and discusses insights from 111 articles in terms of the problem area, theoretical approaches, methods, and tools that have been used to collect and analyse data, the main issues, and identified research gaps. The results show that most of the existing scientific work on the circular economy and circular solutions addressing consumption has focussed on identifying factors that drive or hinder the consumption of circular solutions. A smaller but expanding set of articles has focussed on offering insights into the nature, meaning, and dynamics of consumption in the context of the circular economy. According to this set of articles, consumption in the circular economy is anonymous, connected, political, uncertain, and based on multiple values, not only utility. A smaller set of papers has explored the integration of user and consumer perspectives into design processes. Although these contributions are relevant, opportunities for further research are still open, particularly regarding socio-material and cultural aspects of consumption in the context of the circular economy, and the role of digitalisation. In addition, more work could be done regarding strategies to foster not only acceptance but also the adoption and diffusion of the circular economy. Based on the findings of this literature review, some ideas for a research agenda on the issue of consumption in the circular economy are outlined. 6. Source: Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review (#PSBVW7), Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Juana Camacho-Otero, p. 1 Context: #HHKK3Q Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review #RRR7Y9 1. Introduction Matching excerpt #JGRGPR: Despite the realisation that the circular economy translates into significant changes in consumption, recent reviews on the circular economy do not provide comprehensive accounts of such issues. For example, Kirchherr et al. [2] found that only 19% of the papers defining the circular economy considered consumption, and highlighted that not enough is known about why consumers would participate in the circular economy or not. Van Eijk’s [10] review focussed on drivers and barriers to the circular economy, and although it included consumption and business/consumer acceptance as one of its thematic areas, the insights offered were rather general. Geissdoerfer et al. [11] investigated the relationship between the circular economy and sustainability, but did not make any significant reference regarding the consumer or consumption aspects. Finally, Ghisellini et al. [12] found that the existing literature on circular economy considers consumers to be passive and rational recipients that will follow labels and other production-side signals when making decisions. 7. Source: Material culture and the circular economy (#R69WZQ), Elizabeth Shove, Jenny Rinkinen, p. 0 Context: #J8TDC3 Material culture and the circular economy #7H9E6C KEYWORDS Matching excerpt #EUZWN7: circular economy, material culture, object relations, repair, sharing, re-use, material flow 8. Source: Material culture and the circular economy (#R69WZQ), Elizabeth Shove, Jenny Rinkinen, p. 2 Context: #J8TDC3 Material culture and the circular economy #FAPRPA 4. Discussion Matching excerpt #RP8YNG: A third still more significant issue is that policies that are intended to foster a circular economy avoid or marginalize fundamental questions about the constitution of need, including the part that policy making itself plays in reproducing unsustainable practices and systems of provision. If the primary ambition is efficient flow and use of resources and goods, then changes in patterns of consumption and reduction of resource use is secondary ambition and treated as such. There is a risk that circular economy initiatives cling on to narrow growth-oriented 9. Source: The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy (#UMYA27), Kersty Hobson, p. 9 Context: #WE2KWR The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #XK6L5Q The user-consumer in Circular Economy: beyond competitive prices and increased efficiencies Matching excerpt #BKS58J: Welch et al. (2017) argue that there is a curious incongruence at the heart of Figure 1. To date, the majority of CE debates and research have focussed on products, materials, markets, and value extraction from specific energy and/or resource life cycles: the materials and processes that constitute the CE. Yet it is the ‘consumer’ and ‘user’ – all of us, the creators, perpetuators, and subjects of the economy – that have central place in the EMF ‘butterfly’ diagram, as the nodes around which CE circular loops and cascades revolve and return to (Hobson et al. , forthcoming ). As such, how our roles and agency are framed and enacted is a crucial component of the successes or failings of CE interventions. Or as Korhonen et al. have put it (2018, p. 41), ‘the new consumption culture is a critical part of the circular economy in its effort to reduce the nature-society-nature linear throughput flow of materials and energy.’ 10. Source: Household consumption at the crossroads: A bibliometric decoding of global sustainability trends, research gaps, and collaborative networks (2015-2025) (#ZB3YSD), B.K. Prahani, Hendry Cahyono, Iszan Hana Kaharudin, Kukuh Arisetyawan, Ladi Wajuba Perdini Fisabilillah, M. Satriawan, M.A. Ghofur, N. Suprapto, Ruth Eviana Hutabarat, S. Andari, Wenny Restikasari, Zain Fuadi Muhammad RoziqiFath, p. 8 Context: #B56H95 Household consumption at the crossroads: A bibliometric decoding of global sustainability trends, research gaps, and collaborative networks (2015-2025) #VPJKSQ 4 Conclusion Matching excerpt #M8SACH: from the US, China, and the UK, while regions like Africa and Southeast Asia remain underrepresented. Core themes such as carbon footprint and energy efficiency prevail, yet emerging areas like the circular economy and AI-driven consumption optimization require deeper exploration. Methodological limitations persist due to reliance on limited databases, necessitating integration of platforms like Web of Science and Google Scholar for broader generalizability. Future research must prioritize reducing geographic and thematic imbalances by focusing on underrepresented regions, adopting participatory methods to capture localized insights, and addressing rapid urbanization and energy transitions. Additionally, incorporating equity metrics such as gender parity and funding accessibility into bibliometric analyses and evaluating long-term impacts of behavioral interventions will align studies with the SDGs, fostering environmental resilience and global equity. Approximate matches 1. Source: From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices: socio-spatial transformations in the Circular City (#4AE86F), Kersty Hobson, p. 2 Context: #7TWE3G From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices: socio-spatial transformations in the Circular City #XUQXYU KEYWORDS Score: 0.569 Related excerpt #KTYZJQ: practices; metrics on what constitutes circularity; as well as the increasing “circular-washing” of goods and services (as in “greenwashing”: see Correa et al., 2017). 2. Source: From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices: socio-spatial transformations in the Circular City (#4AE86F), Kersty Hobson, p. 1 Context: #7TWE3G From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices: socio-spatial transformations in the Circular City #XUQXYU KEYWORDS Score: 0.564 Related excerpt #39YZES: Circular economy; consumption; practice theory 3. Source: Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy (#8ZKAT7), Kersty Hobson, p. 0 Context: #ECVDXM Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy #7JJN4G Keywords Score: 0.589 Related excerpt #FJJWUG: circular economy, materialities, product service system, prosumer 4. Source: Circular Consumption Practices as Matters of Care (#BQ2W57), Elina Närvänen, Malla Mattila, Nina Mesiranta, Outi Koskinen, p. 0 Context: #NLZXGJ Circular Consumption Practices as Matters of Care #88E4W4 Introduction Score: 0.568 Related excerpt #WDBXVM: The transition to a circular economy (CE) is one of the central political goals of the European Union (Calisto Friant et al., 2021). CE has been defined as a systemic framework intended to provide solutions for pressing sustainability problems by replacing the end-of-life concept with reducing, reusing, recycling, and recovering materials throughout production, distribution, and consumption processes (Kirchherr 5. Source: Freecycling Markets as Sustainable Materialist Movements? Closing Reuse Circularity Loops in Singapore (#FHZZ6U), Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Qian Hui Tan, p. 0 Context: #Q7N47M ABSTRACT #9A563U KEYWORDS: Score: 0.573 Related excerpt #8S6R7F: Circular economy, R-behaviours, sustainable materialism, reuse, rescue, recirculation 6. Source: Freecycling Markets as Sustainable Materialist Movements? Closing Reuse Circularity Loops in Singapore (#FHZZ6U), Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Qian Hui Tan, p. 3 Context: #DNLVCU 2. STATE POLICIES AND DISCOURSES IN SINGAPORE'S CIRCULAR TRANSITION Score: 0.567 Related excerpt #273AZV: to measuring a reduction in consumption/waste and reuse rates). Although recycling rates are often mobilised as a proxy for quantifying how 'circular' an economy is, high recycling rates should not be conflated with high circularity rates (Price and Joseph 2000; Reike et al. 2018). Third, whereas the imperative to reduce and reuse threatens a consumerist-capitalist system, recycling is less damaging to the status quo and the retail landscape, since the recycling of post-consumer waste requires consumption in the first place. Economic sustainability continues to be the state's foremost concern, as reflected in the state's constant refrain about how a circular transition can present Singapore with new employment opportunities (Singapore Government News 2020a; 2020b). 7. Source: Freecycling Markets as Sustainable Materialist Movements? Closing Reuse Circularity Loops in Singapore (#FHZZ6U), Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Qian Hui Tan, p. 1 Context: #FRLSVA 1. INTRODUCTION Score: 0.567 Related excerpt #P4K8SC: The transition towards a 'circular economy' has gained traction in the wake of a climate emergency and environmental crisis. As opposed to a linear take-make-dispose model, a circular economic paradigm has been touted as the solution to resource depletion and waste production by turning waste (i.e. outputs) into resources (i.e. inputs) for another production cycle. Such a transformation closes the circularity loop, which is realised via a range of R-behaviours (also called R-hierarchies or R-imperatives). Reike et al.'s (2018) hierarchy of circular R-behaviours, also called resource value retention options (ROs) include refuse (R0), reduce (R1), resell/reuse (R2), repair (R3), refurbish (R4), remanufacture (R5), repurpose (R6), recycle (material, R7), recover (energy R8) and re-mine (R9). They have divided their ten ROs into short, medium and long loops. Short loops (R0–R3) exist in proximity to the consumer. Medium loops (R4–R6) involve business networks for upgrading (e.g. refurbishing) a product that is indirectly linked to the consumer. Long loops (R7–R9) entail waste processing activities that are far removed from the consumer, with things being broken down and losing their original utility. 8. Source: Material culture and the circular economy (#R69WZQ), Elizabeth Shove, Jenny Rinkinen, p. 0 Context: #J8TDC3 Material culture and the circular economy #7H9E6C KEYWORDS Score: 0.601 Related excerpt #EUZWN7: circular economy, material culture, object relations, repair, sharing, re-use, material flow 9. Source: Material culture and the circular economy (#R69WZQ), Elizabeth Shove, Jenny Rinkinen, p. 0 Context: #J8TDC3 Material culture and the circular economy #CNF67G 1. Introduction Score: 0.582 Related excerpt #RHNFFH: A “circular economy” would turn goods that are at the end of their service life into resources for others, closing loops in industrial ecosystems and minimizing waste... It would change economic logic because it replaces production with sufficiency: reuse what you can, recycle what cannot be used, repair what is broken, remanufacture what cannot be repaired. (Stahel, 2016: 435) 10. Source: The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy (#UMYA27), Kersty Hobson, p. 5 Context: #WE2KWR The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #VACME2 The Circular Economy: from disparate sub-disciplines to holistic framework? Score: 0.568 Related excerpt #T2FA3L: That point aside, it is clear from Figure 1 that EMF's take on CE delineates distinct practices and directions for resource flows. Various 're' loops (redesign, repair, remanufacture, reuse, and recycle) are key, set-up as essential to keeping resources moving though systems for longer periods of time so that 'maximum value' (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2017a.) can be extracted. In turn, such practices map onto, and aim to foster a wide range of real-world interventions across, multiple scales and systems. These include making localised resource systems less wasteful (e.g. IBM Swiss-based data centres using excess heat to warm external facilities); redesigning products to enable disassembly for repair and recycling (as in smart phone, Fairphone: see https://www.fairphone.com/ ); and deploying urban planning policies and interventions to facilitate transitions towards 'circular cities' (Prendeville et al. 2018). ### 7. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "9XAKTW", "82G2QE" ], "expand": true } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "query": "things linger shelf slow stay too long" } ``` ### 8. Tool result: read THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation PARAGRAPH #PL9BXR This chapter examines freecycling as a practice constituted by a physical venue and the materials flowing through it, the meanings that recruit and retain participants, and the competencies that order the exchange. Throughout the chapter I move between analysis of freecycling as practice-entity and as performance, especially attending to moments of friction and tension where the two pull against each other. PARAGRAPH #EKYQ3W Following the trajectory of things moving through Brīvbode, I trace the incoming flow of things into Brīvbode, starting with the decisions of divestment in the households of participants. I look at how Brīvbode is positioned among possible routes of divestment, and turn to the site itself to see how its material elements sustain the practice of circulation, as well as how the competencies and norms at play let the swapshop cope with the constant pressure of overflow. PARAGRAPH #XYAHKP Turning towards the acquisition side, I show how the value and usefulness of Brīvbode is experienced through a plurality of meanings, and how participants negotiate between conceptions of charity and exchange. I also examine how the absence of price reshapes participants’ attachment to objects, and the competencies of letting go that the practice both requires and cultivates. Finally I consider the range of participant orientations towards freecycling as a practice of sustainability. PARAGRAPH #L252MY Across the chapter, I sustain the view that the character of Brīvbode as a non-monetary site of exchange is held together less by a single definition than by the moral economy that allows incompatible orientations to coexist. SECTION #2JEZWG Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home PARAGRAPH #5XUPCJ The material outcome of one practice present in Brīvbode (domestic divestment: things arrive) is a direct resource for another (sequential acquisition: things are taken), sustaining the circularity between different households and the freeshop. Instead of starting at the “shop”, freecycling in Brīvbode can be viewed as starting with the outward flow of things no longer needed or wanted in the household and the question of what to do with them. The practice of managing this flow (what Počinkova et al. (2023) call voluntary disposal) is what brings most givers to Brīvbode. The swapshop offers them an opportunity for circulating materials as well as a way of managing attachment and detachment from things. Brīvbode is one node in the available infrastructure of divestment, and is distinguished from others by what it means to route things through it. PARAGRAPH #CLU5VP Noting how meanings migrate across practices, Shove et al. (2012) mention how thrift, for example, is no longer expressed through darning socks at home – now a rather rare practice – but has moved, as Gregson (2007) shows, into methods and styles of disposal and divestment. Divesting responsibly has become one of the ways people sustain and recreate identity in relation to their things. PARAGRAPH #TYTN9E The ideal encouraged by the organisers in Brīvbode is for participants to both give and take, yet the two roles do not always recruit the same carriers or sustain participation through the same meanings. Giving in Brīvbode is typically more structured by the motives of givers rather than by the needs of the receivers. Giving contributes to a stock of the swapshop and is shaped by the givers’ assessments of their sense of responsibility toward still-usable objects (too good to throw away), hopes for things finding new trajectories with other carriers, and their capacity to manage the work of getting rid of things well. The practice is donor-driven, and things arriving reflect more the rhythms and pressures of household life, and coordination with receivers’ needs is only indirect. PARAGRAPH #WEBXCF Divestment in Brīvbode is distributed across time unevenly and concentrated around rhythms of domestic material arrangements and particular life events. People typically bring things in batches – no longer wanted items are set aside and accumulate at home until, e.g. a bag is full and is then divested to Brīvbode. PARAGRAPH #AB93FC Moving home, renovation, seasonal clearing, and sorting through a deceased relative’s belongings generate larger pulses of divestment. Participants described sorting through an entire previous owner’s life when buying a flat, routing things to Brīvbode and to friends when downsizing, helping relatives to divest after moving home. PARAGRAPH #7Y7J2Z The size of the home is a very constitutive material element for divestment as smaller living spaces generate a more immediate need to move things out in order to fulfill, for example, the ideal of an uncluttered home – this requires both strong competency for managing household material streams and established divestment routes for what must leave. Brīvbode functions as one such route. PARAGRAPH #CWZ4L2 The ideal of a decluttered home functions both as cultural script and as embodied relief. Gundega puts on tidying consultant TV shows when she sorts at home, though the volume of advice tends to produce anxiety rather than clarity – no one person can remember it all. Viesturs is more pragmatic about decluttering methods: "I sense there are all sorts of methods and things, but it all seems like a luxury problem to me. Although maybe we should promote something like that – users of those methods would definitely supply us with better quality content." PARAGRAPH #V83RLN The act of bringing things to Brīvbode performs moral work that throwing away does not – it can relieve guilt of having acquired unnecessarily, maintain the identity of a responsible consumer, and transfer some of the responsibility for what happens next to the swapshop. Divesting well and finding a route that feels appropriate to the object's remaining value is itself a practice with normative dimensions: there are right and wrong ways to let things go, and Brīvbode offers one of the right ways. PARAGRAPH #PQV5PN Participants who divest in Brīvbode mentioned the non-transparency of the textile container system in comparison to the freeshop. Both routes offer removal and a presumed social good, but participants expressed particular satisfaction for witnessing circulation in Brīvbode – moments when they saw someone taking the items they brought. Although giving and taking are decoupled and mediated by the swapshop, participants can sometimes observe the circulation during their visits, a characteristic noted by many with a kind of quiet pleasure. The divestment is completed by seeing or knowing an item was taken, and this visibility closes the divestment cycle affectively. The opportunity for other visitors to access the materials is valued, while the textile collection management system is deemed too distanced to imagine who benefits. PARAGRAPH #7ZXWJU In absence of a specific receiver, while trying to negotiate the appropriate value and quality standards for the items circulated, givers construct a figure of a receiver, a meaning which shapes the practice from the giving side. Aiga describes her hope that a homeless person from the neighbourhoods of Ķengarags or Purvciems, someone in genuine need would use what she brings. This imagery expands what counts as worth passing on: objects that might be marginal by taste standards become appropriate if genuine need is the criterion, and the threshold for what counts as good enough shifts accordingly. PARAGRAPH #YNY54V The threshold of acceptability in Brīvbode is negotiated situationally, and this uncertainty can become a source of tension. Aiga described how she continues wearing clothing that is slightly pilled and normally uses dry food items past their expiry date – her own standards of what remains usable are linked to the meaning of genuine need but she cannot know in advance whether the items she brings to Brīvbode will be acknowledged as suitable. After receiving comments once about the quality of something she brought to Brīvbode, she prefers to not linger and leave her things quickly. The imagined receiver who accepts everything gives way to the real social encounter where standards are negotiated by someone else. PARAGRAPH #MS53CN The supply arriving in Brīvbode is shaped by these contested meanings – participant competencies of evaluating items as appropriate and the rhythms of domestic life. As such it is often unpredictable. PARAGRAPH #796PVP In reality, Brīvbode also functions as a divestment route for items that more regulated reuse channels would not accommodate: unfinished repair projects and textile fragments can sometimes be found, photographs and used magazines, not entirely complete jigsaw puzzles. Sometimes volunteers would remark that they already look for signs of wear and tear in suspicion about reasons an item has been brought to Brīvbode. They are aware that the swapshop can become a route of last resort for objects that are genuinely difficult to route elsewhere. What counts as acceptable and what counts as waste is decided through social judgment rather than formal criteria. I sometimes brought things in my backpack but ended up not taking them out as on second thought they seemed too worn or not suited. PARAGRAPH #HN8W7V Fieldwork observations reveal different versions and scales of what counts as usable and worthy: I recall a collection of single-use sugar packages; a bundle of expired covid tests (I spent time unpacking the alcohol wipes and watched a woman take them); carefully washed plastic containers that were taken to the recycling bin after all (although the sour cream containers are useful in spring for growing plantings). A regular visitor brought coloured wire offcuts generated by her husband’s wireworking practice – she imagined someone who makes art or does craft work with children could be taking them, as they were never on the shelf anymore the next time she visited. Her husband generates surplus, she routes it to Brīvbode through her domestic management, an unknown hypothetical third person absorbs it into their own. The trajectory is sustained by an imagined right-owner who may not exist, and the volunteers did not have the heart to tell her the bags of small plastic pieces were not used that way. PARAGRAPH #5GWZER Yet unpredictability of supply works both ways – e.g. the same giver who took extra effort to send Brīvbode a parcel with stained old plates that raised volunteer questions about the balance of invested energy for handling it, divested a bag full of colourful folk-style knitted mittens another time – laid out on the table, those attracted many visitors’ attention with shared beauty. This uncertainty of supply is itself part of what sustains participant engagement with the practice through meanings of “serendipity” and magic moments of unexpected “good catch”. PARAGRAPH #4G43HR The same logic that makes divestment easy also can make Brīvbode available as a pressure valve. Fast fashion sometimes arrives with tags still attached; one participant brought clothing she had purchased online – after it did not fit she arranged a return, and was told by the company to donate it rather than send it back – the retailer in this case is routing their surplus to volunteers to manage. PARAGRAPH #9CFEH4 Divestment is normalised and sought after. As Brīvbode manager Rasa observed: "Often we're simply a place to dump it all and go buy new things." In this view, Brīvbode appears as evidence of the structural conditions it aspires to address rather than a solution to them. There is tension present in Brīvbode between the swapshop as an alternative caring system and as a low-threshold overflow channel, and this tension does not resolve easily. SECTION #PBFQ5E Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow PARAGRAPH #2PU5ZY On Thursdays and Fridays a queue often forms by Brīvbode before noon – sometimes more than ten people wait to be let in. The first two hours are the busiest. Rasa sometimes takes a breath before unlocking the door: "It begins." PARAGRAPH #X8RDCG After an item is divested to Brīvbode, it does not belong to the donor anymore, it belongs to the swapshop. This transfer of ownership is actively managed: takers are discouraged from taking things from the sorting table before they are processed, as their enthusiasm has caused discomfort to other visitors in the past. PARAGRAPH #SUZYLN However, sorting is done “on the spot” and in the same room, and things move fast. As Larsen (2023) observes, in thrift shops, practices are often characterized by a "reversal" of standard economic logic, where the goal is to move things along as quickly as possible rather than to maximize the profit per individual item. This can also be said about Brīvbode – there’s excitement about things moving quickly. PARAGRAPH #RQ8CCN Physical instead of virtual co-presence shapes the quality of encounters between people and objects. As Tan and Yeoh (2024), writing about freecycling markets in Singapore, observe, “relational-material exchanges play out better as an embodied co-presence with others/things” – objects can be handled, tried on and assessed, and an item of decent quality will eventually find a taker. PARAGRAPH #LHLZ8Y The physicality and permanence of Brīvbode as a site is one of the main attributes setting it apart from other similar initiatives that often struggle with availability of affordable rental space, especially in high density urban areas. Tan and Yeoh (2024) note how, because of this reason, organisers of Singapore markets must bin or redistribute excess items after every event. They identify availability of rental and storage space as one of the main pre-requisites for functioning freecycling initiatives – thus it is important to note how regular operation in the same physical venue constitutes the practice of freecycling, as it becomes a stable and recurring weekly infrastructure for participants. This enables visitors to sustain a regular visiting rhythm through which, for many of them, freecycling becomes genuinely embedded in everyday life. PARAGRAPH #KMD7AJ The space in Brīvbode is organised and decorated to resemble a retail environment with a DIY aesthetic – with hangers and shelves, and garments sometimes arranged by colour in the manner of the formerly operating secondhand chain Degas. The aesthetic is not fixed, however, as curatorial disagreements exist over the best presentation and each shift can leave its own curatorial mark. Rasa describes the tension between celebrating volunteer initiative and an aesthetic that, in her view, would communicate more value through similarity to a retail environment, leaving more space between things, signifying that quality items can be found in Brīvbode. "The emptier the shelves, the more people find," she notes. A different aesthetic displaying abundance of things on offer and decorating with plushies appeals to another volunteer. These mundane disagreements hold competing views about which meanings the practice of freecycling should enact. Material and meaning elements of the practice are not settled but are actively contested through performance. PARAGRAPH #CL5CS8 The regularity of operation that the physical on-site format allows also fosters social contact among participants. Opening hours twice per week is both a way to manage the necessary volunteer labour and a social encounter catalyst – temporal tightening means that visitors are more likely to encounter each other. The volunteer in charge of the shift anchors the social experience, and the personal relationships accumulate over repeated visits. "On Thursdays everyone asks where Nadja is. And on Fridays everyone asks where Viesturs is." While Brīvbode is not a primary site for socialisation for most participants, regular visitors, especially those living in single person households, noted the meaningfulness of the social aspect of visiting, the casual contact with known “faces”, Brīvbode being a place to go and the visits giving a structure to the week. PARAGRAPH #WW8YUW Within the material realm, Brīvbode is also embedded in and dependent upon broader infrastructural arrangements in order to manage the overflow it cannot absorb. The swapshop passes leftover textiles – in some estimates up to 30 % of the received flow (Akule et al. 2023) – to textile collection containers. The shop would not be viable if it had to cover the costs of regular unsorted waste collection. Also, off-season clothing such as winter coats that take a lot of space are stored in collaboration with charity organisations that have access to larger storage premises. Brīvbode can sustain – in a pragmatic, improvised manner – because of this material entanglement instead of trying to resolve the full material cycle on its own. PARAGRAPH #2TPNCM The physical experience of overflow is a constant of volunteering, and bags often arrive faster than they can be processed. Often my task during shifts was to sort and put out children’s items. The boxes were already full, with piles forming, when I asked Rasa: 'Don't you feel like the things are just pouring down on you?' 'Yes, that's why I no longer have any tolerance for things. I realise I feel relief that these clothes are dirty, because there simply isn't any more space." PARAGRAPH #3USBHB During another shift, Rasa offered me a handmade black ceramic plate someone had brought that day. I was glad to take it, but before my departure confusion arose about where it had gone. It turned out, more stuff had piled up on top of it on the sorting table as visitors kept coming with their divestment. Rasa laughed: “This is how it is here.” As a material site, Brīvbode is an active flow that requires tending and occasionally swallows its own offerings. PARAGRAPH #PNCAWA The pull of Brīvbode as a divestment destination persists even when the physical site is temporarily absent. For several weeks after the Brīvbode pop-up venue in Āgenskalns closed at the end of summer 2021, people kept bringing boxes and bags of belongings, leaving them in front of the empty shop. The practice had recruited carriers so effectively that the site’s closure did not interrupt the flow. PARAGRAPH #SFAYYS The things are made visible by being put in the shop. It makes the material overflow more visible – there is no “away” to throw your things. SECTION #QP7HMF Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation PARAGRAPH #TDQ4JL The material composition of Brīvbode reflects the gendered organisation of (clothing) consumption more broadly. The majority of items circulating through the freeshop are women’s and children’s clothing – a pattern that mirrors the more feminised character of household consumption management. As noted in the methodology chapter, men do participate in Brīvbode, but on a lesser scale and with different practice career tendencies – while men’s clothing is sought after, they also look for books to circulate in second hand markets, CD’s, electronics. PARAGRAPH #BCDC5C The gendered asymmetry extends to the competencies required to manage the space. Viesturs described his initial challenge of developing a workable system for sorting women’s clothing after he started volunteering: "Well, f*ck, look, where do I put it. Trying to systematize women’s clothing, it’s like a tree with many branches." The competence of sorting – especially women’s clothing as in this case – is not self-evident as the proliferation of categories resists simple organisation and has to be worked out through practice. PARAGRAPH #2U6CTU The standards applied to men’s clothing also operate differently. There is simply less of it, and the threshold for what is acceptable is lower – men’s clothing is assumed to be used for physical work and is assessed accordingly. One day two young women looking through the clothing boxes for film costumes picked up an undershirt and commented on how disgusting it was, while a man right next to them took it. Rasa later confirmed the shirt was not in a good condition, but she had put it out because, as she noted, everything gets taken from the men’s section. The norms of assessment reflect whose consumption practices the swapshop is organised around. PARAGRAPH #F9CK8T While there are explicit written rules governing exchange in Brīvbode, those are framed in general relational terms – “bring things that would bring joy to someone; bring things you would give to a friend” – and there are no formal categories of exclusion. Norms regarding acceptability are defined and enacted situationally and relationally, which can be both a strength and a source of friction about where the boundaries lie. PARAGRAPH #BZ6FJC Being in Brīvbode is characterized by constant sorting decisions, trying to maintain an acceptable level of presentation and quality of items. The work of maintaining quality and the work of maintaining relationships sometimes pull in different directions, and the balance between lenience and care is negotiated in every shift. At times I heard people felt uneasy about Viesturs openly commenting on things they had brought. PARAGRAPH #Y7K4KZ This is observable even in the circulation of food items, which, although not central, are also present in Brīvbode. As opposed to many community-based exchange initiatives where the circulation of food is governed strictly, e.g. accepting only unopened items and carefully monitoring expiration dates, in Brīvbode the circulation is shaped less by formal regulation and more by trust and familiarity among participants. Open packages may be accepted when brought by known visitors, suggesting that assessments of safety and acceptability are negotiated socially. PARAGRAPH #7CR75E A stronger boundary emerges in relation to certain categories of items, such as medicine. In one instance, a regular visitor brought various medications, explaining their uses to the day manager. While the items were initially placed on the table for taking, a while later another worker quietly removed them, remarking to me, “I don’t think I support this.” The removal was not communicated directly to the donor, suggesting a reluctance to enforce the norm explicitly. Instead of a formal refusal, workers might suggest that perhaps the giver has not noticed the defects, but items could be washed and brought back or simply delay decisions until the giver is no longer present. PARAGRAPH #CUBS5Q "Man kaut kā mazāka vēlme ņemt visu, ko es redzu, par spīti tam, ka tas it kā ir tas 'brīv'... es kaut kā vairāk cienu to visu, kas tur ir izlikts." [I somehow feel less desire to take everything I see, despite the fact that it's all "free" – I somehow have more respect for everything that's laid out there.] Madara explicitly contrasts her response to freeness with others' – she imagines the hoarder who grabs because it's free, and positions herself as someone for whom freeness activates restraint rather than acquisition. This is the moral economy of freeshopping from the perspective of someone still in the early stages of learning the practice's norms. "Kādam varbūt tas 'brīv' rada vēlmi, ka viss ir bez maksas, tagad ņemam, ņemam, ņemam. Man tas nospēlē kaut kā tieši otrādāk." [For some, maybe "free" creates the urge that everything is free, so now we take, take, take. For me it works the opposite way.] "Es to uztveru kā apmaiņu. To vārdu 'brīvu' kaut kā izslēdzu... Sākumā tas tā bišķiņ mulsināja, ka esmu kā apzagusies." [I see it as exchange. I somehow switch off the word "free"… At first it was a bit confusing, as if I had stolen something.] This is competency acquisition: Madara is learning how to understand and inhabit the value regime of Brīvbode, and she narrates the process explicitly. PARAGRAPH #MQPMT2 Competencies of Circulation PARAGRAPH #76T3WR The competencies that sustain freecycling in Brīvbode are largely social and evaluative rather than technical, and none of them require formal training — but each is acquired through repeated participation and is unevenly distributed across practitioners. Material literacy — recognising wool from synthetic fibres, identifying well-made construction, spotting a hidden stain — is foundational, and volunteers develop it most acutely through handling what arrives. Rasa, in the recollection of one student researcher who spent time in the shop, has "the most trained eye for the quality of things" [visuztrenētākā acs uz mantu kvalitāti]; her own acquisition criteria turn on fibre type and durability, preferring what is "more nature-friendly, ecological, and long-lasting." Visitors develop a more limited version of the same competency. Laura describes herself as a careful second-hand user who checks everything thoroughly, though she admits she has still occasionally taken home items that turned out to be broken on closer inspection. PARAGRAPH #EXTCGS On the acquisition side, competence also means knowing when to come and how to navigate the space. Agate has mapped the visitor typology and times her arrivals strategically; Marta describes starting in the first room and returning when something new has arrived. Equally important is the negative competency of not taking — knowing what one needs and what one already has. Zane keeps a list on her phone of items she is actively looking for, and her stylist consultations work as an investment in self-knowledge that guards against impulsive acquisition. Agate explicitly asks herself while browsing whether a given item could be combined with what she already owns. This is cognitive work — holding a mental model of one's wardrobe and household — and without it, acquisition becomes impulsive and the divestment work follows. The competencies of acquisition and divestment are therefore inseparable: each unconsidered acquisition becomes future divestment labour. PARAGRAPH #73DSQT On the divesting side, the practice expects items to arrive clean and in reasonable condition, requiring washing, stain-checking, and sometimes minor repair, though norms vary: Marija leaves the washing to the recipient, while Anna says she never divests anything that has been repaired. The boundary between "ready to circulate" and "needs more work first" is itself negotiated through the practice. PARAGRAPH #J4CQAN “on material literacy, meaning the skills and knowledge about different materials, how durable they are and with what treatment they last longest. This includes knowledge about appropriate washing, storing (Figures 2 and 3) and other care techniques like using a lint shaver or an iron.” SECTION #PZH45P Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange PARAGRAPH #QU37KZ Practices have normative meanings – understandings upheld about what correct participation looks like, what the practice is for, and who belongs in it. In Brīvbode, normative work is done by organisers to uphold the meaning of the freecycling as an exchange as opposed to a charity. This framing is a normative aspiration – a claim about who belongs and on what terms, actively maintained against pressure from resellers and heavy-takers. The normative aspiration is held together by a moral vocabulary of equality and reciprocity – the norm that participants bring something or at least contribute in kind or offer their help at the shop is part of what defines active participation in the practice rather than use of a service. This positioning work is felt as particularly needed by organisers also because Brīvbode is located in the neighbourhood of Gaiziņš night shelter. PARAGRAPH #KBESND As Rasa puts it: “Exchange is a very honest way of operating, it requires responsibility from both sides. When both wealthy and poor, old and young can participate, and everyone knows it's on the basis of exchange, that you are equal, nobody gets a discount, nobody is more special. To many people we simply say: “We are not a charity. It's not the case that you come and now demand that you need clean trousers. We are not a charity point, this is an exchange point. Do you actually have something with you for exchange, before you start setting the rules here?” Nadja is very good at negotiating this. “Go to the Red Cross, go to other places that are specifically a charitable institution! We are not a help institution.”” PARAGRAPH #T8P86W Widlok’s (2017) analysis of give boxes – small scale unattended exchange infrastructure in a German town – offers a frame for what the non-monetary arrangement achieves socially. Give boxes, he argues, separate the acts of giving and receiving – donors and recipients do not need to interact directly, and the intermediary space absorbs the social awkwardness of charity. Items move quickly, suggesting ongoing demand, while participants tend to frame their involvement in terms of giving even when they primarily take. PARAGRAPH #UFJ4GC Brīvbode operates on a similar logic: the physical space mediates between participants, making it possible to take without performing need. At the same time, Widlok notes that give boxes are not straightforwardly sharing practices – they tend to be understood within a moral register of charity or almsgiving rather than open-ended reciprocity, and tensions arise when participants extract items for resale rather than use. PARAGRAPH #7FPBUS The imperative to keep things flowing to avoid overflow creates a certain tolerance in case of suspicion for such practices that formally fall outside Brīvbode’s rules. Reselling is not allowed, yet resellers are a suspected presence in Brīvbode. Volunteers mentioned situations when other visitors in Brīvbode have told them they have recognized their divested items at the Āgenskalns flea market the following weekend, which Rasa acknowledges as straightforwardly unpleasant. Yet because it is not always possible to prove, there is also a working accommodation, and Rasa’s position is one of pragmatic acceptance: “At the same time it seems – if he'll find the next user for the thing anyway, the function is fulfilled. Better they make a little money and the thing finds its person, than some hoarder takes it and the things end up in a container." She laughs: "Well, what choice do I have but to believe… We support small businesses." PARAGRAPH #QKY57B This reveals a hierarchy of meanings operating within Brīvbode’s moral economy. The object’s arrival to a sequential user is weighed as more important than the forbidden monetary transaction that may or may not occur along the way. The ethos of non-monetary exchange can be subordinated to the deeper logic of circulation. Besides, if visitors come with something in return, further trajectory is difficult to control. PARAGRAPH #ERMRTL Viesturs frames this ecologically: "Well, I could see them now as forest sanitarians." Without moral approval, the resellers, the hoarders and heavy-takers are reframed as functional elements as they clear out the accumulation of materials that would otherwise clog the space. Viesturs response to this is tactical curatorial competency: if a person he suspects is present at the shop, he often doesn’t put new items out on the shelves until they leave. This is his practical judgement and competency to “read the room” enacted situationally. SECTION #7Z8WUY Letting Go: Attachment Without Price PARAGRAPH #GL6QPX The intensity of circulation of items in Brīvbode and its non-monetary context raise a question about the relationship between price and attachment. Evans’s (2020) framework suggests that attachment is produced through the acquisition-side moments of consumption – appropriation and appreciation, processes that are normally anchored by monetary investment. Assima et al. (2023) describe "financial myopia" – the difficulty of detaching from items one has spent significant money on, even when they are no longer used. This results in "neglected possessions" accumulating in wardrobes as disposal is deferred to avoid the feeling of wasting a significant investment. PARAGRAPH #Q9UXGA The anchor of monetary investment is absent from acquisition in Brīvbode, and some participants articulate the shift in their own relationship to objects directly. Rasa describes how price normally operates as a binding force which Brīvbode alleviates: “You no longer have that heaviness around a thing – I bought it for €40, how can I now throw it out or give it away, not wear it. Now it's simply: if it doesn't suit, bring it back. Try it – it works, or it doesn't. It's much more free." She is pragmatic about this beyond Brīvbode too: “No matter where the garment comes from, there is that percentage of things I take or buy or acquire for myself that I always know won't get worn regardless of whether I've paid money for them or not. So the safest thing to do is to invest as little as possible, so that afterwards there are fewer regrets." This is a recalibration of what kinds of commitment acquisition is. PARAGRAPH #PYZ6UH Fieldwork observations capture this in the dynamic of circulation. A woman arrives and leaves in different shoes than she came in: “I left mine here instead. Today with these trousers, the high heel doesn't suit. Hopefully no fungus..." Another laughs as she leaves her jacket in Brīvbode on a sunny day because she feels too hot: “I left home with clothes on but will be coming back in socks only. I don't need anything.” A third also swaps her jacket on the spot for one she prefers. The meaning of novelty comes across in these cases. PARAGRAPH #34Z7TB Another aspect to the quality of attachment is the possibility of a return after trial and seeing whether attachment will form. It can be difficult to assess in the moment of acquisition whether an item will settle in person’s life. Bringing something back if it does not further loosens the relationship between taking and keeping, allowing a lower stakes and a more experimental participation. This trial opportunity was appreciated by participants whose physical attributes and body shapes are not always catered to in retail: "Because for a small person it's quite hard to find trousers... But here there's the opportunity to try them for some time and see." PARAGRAPH #VXG4LU However, if acquisition carries less commitment, the same conditions that make divestment easier may make acquisition more frequent and less deliberate. My own divestment to Brīvbode often consists of things bought secondhand online as a preferred route of acquisition, but choosing not to invest effort in reselling when they don’t work out. The non-monetary regime does not automatically produce more careful consumption; its relationship to sufficiency depends on the meanings participants bring to it. PARAGRAPH #5NWUSK Elīna describes feeling a sense of responsibility toward everything she acquires – whether bought secondhand, taken from a swap event, or found in Brīvbode. Once something has come to her, she feels obligated to find it a good next home rather than simply discard it: "If this has come to me, then this material... energy and work and transport went into producing it, and I can't just throw it away. I feel I have a duty to figure out how to pass it on to hands where it will be useful." She adds, however, that this sense of responsibility sometimes feels like too heavy a burden to carry. PARAGRAPH #KM4KFK (Sometimes the relation to the shop is a source for jokes: “We have special mega discounts, 100 % – only today and tomorrow!”) PARAGRAPH #F6TNUS The self-management work PARAGRAPH #7397K7 Managing the impulse to take because it is free. Marta describes this explicitly – learning to replace "free" with "exchange" in her mental vocabulary, developing the decision rule that if she is not sure she does not need it. This is deliberate self-regulation work, and it is not trivial. The non-monetary arrangement removes one natural brake on acquisition – financial cost – and participants who want to avoid accumulating must supply that brake themselves through conscious effort. PARAGRAPH #PYSU33 (moral economies of access and restraint) PARAGRAPH #9XUDV9 "Man bija ļoti daudz dažādu veidu... pēdējos pāris gadus es kaut kā esmu no tā atkāvusies, ka es tā vairs nedaru. Es tiešām ļoti izvērtēju, vai man tā lieta tiešām ir nepieciešama." [I used to have so many different kinds of things… in the last couple of years I've somehow weaned myself off it; I no longer do that. I really do evaluate whether the thing is genuinely necessary for me.] Madara describes a conscious shift away from impulse acquiring in secondhand contexts – she recognizes her own past behavior as a problem and has worked to change it. This is deliberate practice modification. Madara: "Es tiešām cenšos nebūt tā tante ar trīs maisiem, kas staigā katru dienu tur no vienas točkas uz otru. To es cenšos nepieļaut un cenšos arī sadraudzēties maksimāli ar tām lietām, kas man ir." [I really try not to be that auntie with three bags who walks every day from one spot to another. I try to avoid that, and try to make peace as much as I can with the things I already have.] Making peace with what you have – sufficiency as an active practice of relationship with objects rather than deprivation. This is a positive formulation of sufficiency that does not rely on environmental discourse. PARAGRAPH #QCXR6D Elīna R. "S1: Bet kā tu nonāci pie tās sajūtas, pie tās atziņas – man jau pietiek? S2: Man vienkārši skapī vairs nav vietas. (smejas) Nu, arī, teiksim, tagad ir ziema, un ir džemperu laiks, un es saprotu, ka es tāpat neuzvelku visus savus džemperus. Nu, tātad man viņu ir acīmredzami par daudz. Un man arī patīk novalkāt lietas. Tur ir kaut kāds tāds, nu, man vismaz, īpašs tā kā kaifs, ka es ar šo lietu esmu tik daudz lietas darījusi kopā, ka viņa ir tik novalkāta, ka viņu, iespējams, pat vairs nevar salabot." [Interviewer: But how did you arrive at that feeling, that realisation – I already have enough? Elīna: There's simply no more space in my wardrobe. (laughs) Well – say it's winter now, sweater season, and I realise I don't wear all my sweaters anyway. So I obviously have too many of them. And I also like wearing things out. There's a kind of – well, for me at least, a special pleasure when I've gone through so much with a thing that it's worn down to the point where maybe it can't even be repaired anymore.] PARAGRAPH #Z2Y4K8 "Es esmu krājēja. Jā, es esmu krājēja." [I'm a hoarder. Yes, I'm a hoarder.] Aiga recognised hoarding tendencies in herself. She links it to scarcity experience – not having had much as a student, learning to keep things because things were hard to come by. The accumulation habit is understood as a survival response to past material insecurity, but she is actively working to change. The turning point was a month-long solo trip through Europe after her employment ended: "Es aizbraucu, un tad ar to arī sākās, ka tagad, nu, tagad tas ir izdarīts, tagad ir jādomā kaut kas par lietām, kas ir par daudz." [I went away [on the trip], and that's when it started – that now, well, it's been done, and now I have to think something about the things that are too many.] Travel – where you carry only what fits in a bag – reframed her relationship to possessions and worked as a biographical rupture that catalyzed practice change. PARAGRAPH #AB5XLD "Es labāk šobrīd lēnā garā atbrīvojos... man nav vienkārši žēl paņemt somu un aizbraukt." [I'd rather let go of things slowly now… I just don't want it to be hard to pick up a bag and leave.] The war anxiety dimension: she is releasing things partly because she wants to be able to leave quickly if necessary. The geopolitical context of Latvia – proximity to Russia, uncertainty since 2022 – appears explicitly in her divestment motivation. PARAGRAPH #LG8X4N "Pieķeršanās jautājums tiek risināts. Viņš ir procesā." [The question of attachment is being worked on. It's in process.] "Brīvbode palīdz, tā teikt, šim procesam attīstīties." [Brīvbode helps, so to speak, this process to develop.] "Šobrīd jau ir uz robežas, tāpēc es saku, ka ir jāatvadās jau no tā, kas jau ir atrasts." [I'm already at the edge now, that's why I say one has to start saying goodbye even to what one has already found.] Māra is explicitly working on her attachment to things – she names it as a problem and frames it as ongoing work. Brīvbode as a tool for developing the capacity to let go. This is the freeshop as infrastructure for a personal practice of detachment. It is a positive framing of the same phenomenon that Rasa describes as generating excess – from Māra's perspective, having a route makes it easier to release. PARAGRAPH #WABKA8 Brīvbode as material infrastructure enabling the practice of letting go. The freeshop does not just receive things; it creates conditions that make divestment possible for people who otherwise could not do it. This is the role of material arrangement in sustaining practice. PARAGRAPH #35KR5F the practice of divestment requires competencies that include emotional regulation and the capacity to detach from objects. Māra is developing these competencies deliberately. SECTION #W2WRDC What People Find Here: Plural Meanings of Acquisition PARAGRAPH #5L3QYB Taking things in Brīvbode is sustained by a variety of meanings that do not need to be shared or mutually coherent across practitioners. The heterogeneity of meanings allows the practice to recruit across a wide and socially diverse public. The following section examines the main meaning clusters and what each reveals about how the practice recruits and retains its carriers – what do people experience as useful and rewarding when they opt to take things in Brīvbode. PARAGRAPH #54GE84 For Marija, the primary meaning is access and dignity as Brīvbode enables a form of self-presentation beyond her regular means: "I dressed like an absolute princess. You can’t even find things like that in a shop." She takes pleasure in the secret source as other people in her networks cannot tell the difference between her clothing originating from Brīvbode or retail. This also has a competence dimension: knowing where to look, when to come, having access to a source others do not use. PARAGRAPH #NMQ6KB Anna frames her participation with a desire for aesthetic autonomy: “I've always really disliked it when I'm wearing something and someone else is wearing exactly the same." Instead of sustainability or thrift, this meaning is based on distinctiveness. Anna also has a sewing competency that works as an extension of the same desire – making her own clothing is the ultimate guarantee of uniqueness: the competency of sewing is sustained by the meaning. Additionally Brīvbode also enables Anna's daily performance of festivity: wearing a glitter dress as everyday wear is possible because Brīvbode provides a low-stakes supply resource. PARAGRAPH #N2JHPC Elīna describes a similar dynamic at a lower threshold of commitment: “You can try out different styles for free. I took a bomber jacket I would never have bought myself." The jacket became one of her most-worn items. Brīvbode enabled a style experiment that she would not have risked financially. Similarly, a practitioner who was exploring cross-dressing also described: "What gives me joy is that I can create different characters from those clothes. For example, yesterday I went to my first cross-dresser date with this beautiful purple wig. I also got these court shoes... And that somehow challenged me to put them to use." PARAGRAPH #D4H3PB Madara’s participation is organised around her craftsperson's gaze – a competency that allows her to notice objects as made of particular components and materials. "When I see an item, I see it not just as a finished garment, but also, for example, as a material – fabric, beads, zippers." This competency distinguishes her participation from others and allows her to find value also in objects that other people might not find useful at all: "I found an old, cut mosquito net, which I use as a base for embroidery." Something that appeared to be waste turned out to be a useful resource to her. This is a heightened version of the right-owner logic – the object finds not just a user but a user who recognizes a value in it that is largely invisible to others. Also Madara’s rugmaking practice originated in having accumulated too many secondhand clothes – material surplus became the origin of a new practice. PARAGRAPH #VGRDGV The craftsperson's gaze has a negative counterpart, however, when it is decoupled from valuing items as a shared resource: some visitors treat the shop as a source of free raw materials, cutting off buttons or zippers from garments, and leaving the damaged items behind – extracting the value themselves while diminishing it for everyone else. PARAGRAPH #RQ88U2 While alternative, these meanings simultaneously overlap with some of the meanings present in capitalist consumption – PARAGRAPH #86WW2X Alongside the meanings of novelty, originality and access is the meaning of class related stigma, and its presence significantly affects the practice’s recruitability. Some participants hinted at it subtly in conversation, but denied it when asked about it directly. Marija is the only one who explicitly named the shame associated with freecycling, and this cuts against any simple narrative of freecycling as normalized exchange practice for people of all walks of life. While actively and regularly using Brīvbode and also praising the things she has managed to acquire as high quality and aesthetically pleasing, nevertheless, she also compares taking from Brīvbode to going through someone else’s trash. Especially when a TV crew came to Brīvbode and a journalist approached her for a couple of words, she flatly refused “I will not let them see that I've fallen so low as to come to Brīvbode." Yet in the same conversation she also reclaims the class label: "I'm common, simply common (prasta – common, plain, I.L.). I will go and get what I need." The value is privately experienced, but restricted in representation. PARAGRAPH #ZEVQDB For some potential practitioners this association with lower class status is a barrier to entry, while others manage it strategically. Several participants mentioned withholding information about the origin of items, especially when passing things acquired in Brīvbode to other people as gifts. As volunteer Anna noted, grandmothers say: “I don't tell my daughter where I got that jacket, because she wouldn't take it.” PARAGRAPH #Z4WUR2 A related strong negative meaning for second hand acquisition holds that these items carry the energy of previous – often deceased – owners. Several participants mentioned this trope but adjusted it to their practice. Viesturs, half-laughing, keeps the spiritual language but reframes it institutionally: "Others say that things have some kind of energy, or the aura of previous owners... We're able to transform that. In a way, Brīvbode is also like a kind of purgatory for things." With this adjusted meaning Brīvbode can function as a threshold space in the object biographies where the weight of previous owners can be released. PARAGRAPH #MD2XMJ This stigma of second hand acquisition is, however, also generationally uneven and appears to be dissolving, similar to patterns reported elsewhere (Gurova, 2024). Changing meanings are shifting the practice’s recruitability. Madara notes how a broader normalization of secondhand acquisition in recent years has produced a shift within her own family, who previously held strong norms against it. Luīze, a highschooler preparing for graduation, uses the English word "thrift shops" to talk about her consumption practices, frames her participation in explicit environmental terms, and reports that her classmates are actively seeking secondhand options for graduation dresses. She attributes the negative meaning her parents hold towards second hand acquisition to “Soviet mentality”. SECTION #GTJY22 Quiet or Reflected Sustainability? PARAGRAPH #T6FW9N In our conversation, Viesturs also positions Brīvbode against charity but from a different angle than Rasa: "Our goal is not to do good for people, I think. Our goal is to do good for the planet… Charity is always related to the meaning of poverty. I think that we need to emphasize the fun factor, the joy factor – swapping, changing clothes. That it's cool, fun, that it's joyful." He is not only describing the meanings that sustain his own participation, but also making a claim about which meanings should be foregrounded to recruit and retain more practitioners. This orientation is present in Brīvbode and practically expressed through organising photo shoots and parties, encouraging playfulness with clothing. PARAGRAPH #LUDRGT When I ask Viesturs if he sees working in Brīvbode as helping visitors or helping a cause, the question turns out to be beside the point: "To me it's so natural now, I don't evaluate it anymore. Others should evaluate it. It's simply a thing I do, without going into philosophical meanings." Sorting, switching clothing, chatting with visitors and attending to the shop so that it continues operating well – have become sufficiently routinised for him that they no longer require justification or meaning-work. The practice has stabilized to the point where the question of what it means has receded behind the doing. PARAGRAPH #M9983A Rasa answers similarly when I enquire about the environmental and sustainability aspects of Brīvbode: “Everything else is so intense… It has remained somehow, in a way, a little secondary." While the sustainability framing remains present – and is foregrounded e.g. when writing project funding applications or designing info materials – it does not need to be actively held by every practitioner in every performance. For both Viesturs and Rasa philosophical meaning-making has receded. This is what Smith and Jehlička (2013) describe as quiet sustainability: practices that produce sustainable outcomes without requiring their practitioners to hold or articulate sustainability as a motivation. PARAGRAPH #CX2SM8 Sustainability as a meaning is present for practitioners, and e.g. Luīze is at the other end of the spectrum for whom it is expressed as primary rather than peripheral. She explicitly framed her participation in terms of ecological responsibility and the wider politics of avoiding fast fashion and microtrends. PARAGRAPH #78HBEQ Līva discussed how the environmental meaning is present for her, but in tension with her actual acquisition practices. She identifies textile consumption as probably one of her most environmentally problematic behaviors, yet was open that knowing it does not resolve it. She estimates she buys an item of clothing every month and frames this as more than she used to in adolescence. The meanings she uses to evaluate her consumption patterns are in tension with the meanings that sustain the acquisition, and neither cancels the other one out. Researching household textile disposal, Sigaard (2026) concludes that even while sustainable consumption is ideally endorsed, disposal is very normalized because it is strongly embedded in identity work, relational considerations and in facilitating other practices. PARAGRAPH #P6X2DJ Also, as I argue, most participants come to Brīvbode for practical and social reasons instead of self-professed environmental conviction. This resonates with Smith and Jehlička’s (2013) concept of quiet sustainability, developed through their research on Czech urban gardeners: sustainable practices that can be widespread and effective but are not articulated in terms of sustainability by their practitioners. Smith and Jehlička contend that quiet sustainability is defined by practices “that result in beneficial environmental or social outcomes, that do not relate directly or indirectly to market transactions, and that are not represented by the practitioners as relating directly to environmental or sustainability goals. Cultures of sharing, repairing, gifting and bartering characterise quiet sustainability” (2013: 155). Latvia provides a productive context for this concept – several participants trace their orientations towards reuse and frugality to generational experience rather than sustainability aspiration. [..] PARAGRAPH #FLSHWG Some participants do find meanings for their participation in explicit sustainability terms, though, and this difference should not be overlooked. The thesis holds both the quiet and the articulated dimensions without collapsing them into a single category, treating the variation between them as empirically interesting. In practice-theoretical terms, however, what practitioners say about why they do what they do is only one element of practice and “doings” hold the centre. PARAGRAPH #SY28Z3 (Lifestyles of Enough) “Finally, the meanings attached to sufficiency-oriented consumption practices go way beyond altruistic motives like environmental concern. As a study by Kropfeld et al. (2018) showed, environmentally concerned consumers (with more altruistic motives) have a higher environmental impact than voluntary simplifiers (with more self-related motives). Personal or egocentric motives, therefore, can lead to sufficiency-oriented behavior, as the example for sharing services from this review showed. This is in line with Sandberg’s (2021) findings on sufficiency practices related to miscellaneous consumption, as she connects a reduction of consumption of various products (incl. clothing) to anti-consumption lifestyles such as voluntary simplicity or frugality. PARAGRAPH #JDEYZH Quiet sustainability – sustainable practices without added sustainability meaning. PARAGRAPH #Q9T2SN what matters in sustainability? e.g. people gather egg cartons because it is easy, but issues that are more impactful and require more resources are more difficult to enact. PARAGRAPH #8B2Y8N Several participants in this study trace their orientations toward thrift and reuse to generational experience of the scarcity of the early post-Soviet period, or to upbringings in which resources were used carefully as a matter of practical necessity rather than environmental commitment. PARAGRAPH #VFPYU2 The “activists” are part of the visitors, yet a large part do not frame their participation in Brīvbode primarily in environmental terms: they come because they have things to give away, because they sometimes find things they need. Their practices have sustainable dimensions that they do not necessarily name or claim. PARAGRAPH #V445EY This framing does not require flattening the diversity of participant orientations. Some visitors do articulate explicit sustainability motivations – concerns about fast fashion, about waste, about the environmental costs of overconsumption. The thesis holds both the quiet and the articulated dimensions without forcing them into a single category, and treats the tension between them as empirically interesting rather than theoretically problematic. One question that remains open is whether explicit articulation makes sustainable practices more effective at retaining practitioners – more resistant to disruption when material or social conditions change. This is beyond the scope of the present study but worth noting as a direction for future research. PARAGRAPH #FV3V4W Māra: "Mammai to lietu nebija daudz, un tās lietas tika visas, nu, ļoti labi uzturētas. Bet tad, kad jau parādījās tie humāno preču veikali, tad savukārt bija otrā drusku galējība." [My mother didn't have many things, and those things were all, well, very well looked after. But then, once the second-hand goods shops (humāno preču veikali, lit. "humanitarian goods shops") appeared, the other extreme came.] SECTION #A3X9XX Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations PARAGRAPH #M3VCHH Freecycling in Brīvbode is sustained by a plurality of meanings that are compatible enough to coexist within the same space. Givers come to resolve the moral weight of unwanted things, the site’s permanence and visibility offer a trusted route for it. Takers come for dignity, experimentation, craft materials, social contact or simple convenience. The moral economy of exchange holds these heterogenous orientations together, as it is actively maintained against the pressure of resellers, heavy takers and people looking for charity, yet flexible enough to accommodate them when the alternative is overflow. PARAGRAPH #4V448P Sustainability can be an outcome without it being a requirement and a conscious orientation for practitioners. The practice recruits and retains carriers through meanings that also have little to do with environmental concern and yet the circulation it enables has sustainable dimensions that persist regardless of how participants frame their involvement. PARAGRAPH #MHM9Q5 This does not resolve the tension running through the chapter of Brīvbode functioning simultaneously as a moral circularity infrastructure embodying an alternative value regime of exchange and responsible material life – and as a low threshold overflow channel that absorbs the surplus generated by the consumption patterns it aspires to counter. This tension just reflects the observed dynamic of how sustainable practices are embedded in contemporary life. THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode PARAGRAPH #DM28T4 Rasa, the principal manager of Brīvbode, compared the swapshop’s operation to the flight of a bumblebee: while seemingly defying the laws of aerodynamics, it nevertheless continues to fly. This chapter examines the work that keeps Brīvbode running. Where the previous chapter examined freecycling as a practice – its venues, materials, meanings, and competencies, and the moral economy through which they cohere – this chapter turns to what that practice costs and to the people who pay it: in time, skill, and effort, and in the relational and ethical attention that the tasks of circulation demand. That labour is largely unpaid, unevenly distributed, and absorbed into existing practices of household management. PARAGRAPH #EF5DET The chapter is organized by two complementary registers. Consumption work (Wheeler and Glucksmann 2015) names the tasks the practice demands – acquiring, sorting, maintaining, divesting, transporting – and tracks how they are distributed across technical, modal, and processual dimensions of the division of labour. Care work, in the feminist tradition and its recent applications to circular consumption (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), names the relational and ethical orientation through which participants take this labour on, often without recognising it as work at all. PARAGRAPH #S6HFAC Bankovska’s (2020) ethnography of the Latvian organic food movement bridges the two: drawing on Graeber (2018: 156), she observes that care is not always a joyful act but often involves unanticipated effort, obligation, hesitation, and disgust. The boundaries between consumption work, care work, and volunteer work are difficult to maintain in practice, and that is precisely what allows the labour that sustains Brīvbode to remain invisible to participants and to circular economy policy alike. SECTION #N8D3HT Time to Give: Volunteers and the Sufficiency Lifestyle PARAGRAPH #5SHEQN Brīvbode is sustained by volunteers for many of whom participation is only possible because their lives are organized around sufficiency – a practice cluster in its own right, characterised by flexible time, low monetary consumption, and small combined income streams. As Tan and Yeoh (2024) note, while material inputs in freecycling markets are readily available, the human labour required to organise and run them is consistently short in supply. As Viesturs puts it: “I understand that the lifestyle I live is complete luxury these days, at least for this part of the world. To have free time, to decide myself what to do with my time – that is the main resource. The most important thing that a person can donate to Brīvbode is their time.” PARAGRAPH #BTZ4RL The sufficiency orientation is visible in how volunteers approach the management of resources in Brīvbode as well. When a new stove was needed, Rasa and her partner welded one themselves using upcycled components: gas canisters, springs from an old sofa, a drain fitting. Rasa framed it matter-of-factly: “What do you do if you don’t want to pay €1000 for a stove? You pick up the angle grinder yourself.” In the spirit of mutual exchange, in return for her partner’s invested time, she promised him a week of help with the tedious final sanding phase of his own DIY motorboat project. PARAGRAPH #KSB7XK This is repair and upcycling competency, sufficiency orientation and collaborative volunteer labour combined in prioritising making do with what is available as both a practical skill and life orientation. Rasa described a similar approach to her own consumption practices: it is more advantageous for her to work less in formal employment and rather invest time in planning meals, researching purchases and visiting secondhand shops than to earn more and consume more easily to keep her preferred level of wellbeing. PARAGRAPH #FT6K3G The volunteers’ time-rich, sufficiency-oriented lives make Brīvbode’s unpaid consumption work possible. They are also what makes possible a form of community-based care that non-profit organisations and local communities can offer to “balance marketised care,” with “clothes-swapping events” listed alongside repair cafés and community fridges as exactly this kind of arrangement (Mesiranta et al. 2025: 26). Sufficiency is the structural condition for both consumption work and care work: it is what makes the labour Brīvbode requires possible, and what allows that labour to be undertaken as care. SECTION #SLFJ9K Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care PARAGRAPH #U7QJHT Valuation work is the ongoing effort of assessing what is worth taking and bringing, and what should be left or discarded. Tölg (2025) describes valuation as comprising both evaluation — judging whether something is valuable — and valorising — the process of making it so — and shows that consumers rely on a range of valuation devices such as garment tags, retail staff knowledge, and resale platforms to perform this work. In retail, the price signal is the most legible such device, quietly slowing acquisition and supplying a shorthand for worth. When it is removed, that work does not disappear; it shifts onto participants and volunteers, drawing on moral and relational registers instead. As Beswick-Parsons et al. (2025) note, those committed to reuse develop the ability to perceive value where others do not, and this evaluative skill is a key competence of circulation work. PARAGRAPH #KWPAYN The shift is most acute for volunteers, who absorb the valuation labour donors and visitors do not. Anna describes how she has developed her intuition for the gap between donor self-assessment and actual quality: “I really know it won’t be good even before I’ve opened the bag. I ask them: ‘Is everything really okay in there?’ ‘Yes, yes, only the best!’ And you open it, and there are moth-eaten pillows, piss-soaked blankets.” This competency has been developed over years of handling what arrives. The work of maintaining quality — assessing, sorting, deciding what goes out and what does not — is a form of consumption work that in commercial retail would fall to paid warehouse or quality-control staff; here it is absorbed by volunteers as a constant and largely invisible competency that visitors, who see only the finished presentation, mostly miss. PARAGRAPH #7X9BV4 Curation extends valuation work beyond sorting into knowing and managing people’s needs. Rasa describes it as having “a filter.” She sometimes holds specific items for specific regular visitors based on accumulated knowledge about their life circumstances: a particular colour of top for a visually impaired visitor, a wedding gift set aside for a regular who recently moved from homelessness into social housing. This is care work and consumption work simultaneously — the kind of matching labour that in retail is performed automatically through pricing, display, and inventory systems, but here depends on Rasa’s relational knowledge of specific people, which cannot be systematised or delegated, and which makes Brīvbode function as something more than a drop-off point. PARAGRAPH #4HW9DD For visitors, the absence of price requires a new framework for what counts as legitimate taking. Madara recalled how disorienting the freeness was on her first visit: “At first it felt a bit like I was stealing.” She resolved this by reframing the transaction: “I see it as exchange. I somehow switch off the word ‘free’.” For her, freeness activates restraint rather than acquisition: “Someone maybe sees ‘free’ and thinks – everything is free, let’s take, take, take. For me it works the opposite way.” Her self-imposed restraint is itself valuation work — a moral framework constructed in the absence of the device that would otherwise supply one. PARAGRAPH #4EZCAK Divestment, too, is shaped by valuation. When an item retains monetary value, participants take on the labour of online selling — photographing, writing descriptions, communicating with buyers, arranging meetings. As one participant noted: “you have to pull yourself together, photograph it and put it somewhere.” Brīvbode lowers this work considerably: it is a known, walkable destination that absorbs some of the divestment labour through volunteers and releases participants from finding a buyer or judging a recipient. PARAGRAPH #A2APRY Across donating, curating, taking, and divesting, valuation in Brīvbode is at once consumption work — the labour of sorting, assessing, and redistributing — and care work, in the form of attention to what specific things will mean for specific people. Without the shorthand of price, both come into the open. SECTION #EBTHSE Not the Bin: Modal Labour and the Informal Route PARAGRAPH #SZG4E8 If §5.2 traced the valuation work the absence of price creates, this section turns to the kind of arrangement in which that work takes place. Wheeler and Glucksmann’s modal dimension names how labour is distributed across different socioeconomic arrangements — paid and unpaid, formal and informal, market and non-market, household and institution — and how the same task takes on a different character depending on which arrangement it is embedded in. The same act of sorting used clothes is paid retail work in a thrift chain, contracted labour at a municipal textile collection point, unpaid domestic labour at home, and something else again at Brīvbode. The question this section asks is what kind of arrangement Brīvbode is, modally speaking, and what difference its form makes for the labour that runs it and the people it recruits. PARAGRAPH #QQ9MKA Brīvbode is indirectly embedded in wider textile collection infrastructure, but the chain of work usually connects one household to another. Objects leaving one home pass through the swapshop and arrive in someone else’s home where a new set of consumption work tasks begin – storing, integrating, eventually deciding what to do when the object might no longer be wanted. PARAGRAPH #EW2HC4 Along this chain, unpaid volunteering, household management, neighbourly help, care work, and informal exchange come together in ways that blur distinctions between market and non-market activity and make the labour difficult to recognise as work at all, even though the system depends on it. This is precisely the kind of community-based care that, as Mesiranta et al. (2025) argue, marketised arrangements cannot perform: sequential reuse depends not on material availability alone but on what Hobson (2020) calls social circularities — the relational labour that keeps things moving between people. PARAGRAPH #VA7PZF Some participants choose Brīvbode precisely because they do not want to perform labour for formal waste management institutions – they prefer the more relational, informal route. This is a modal choice: the same divestment work takes a different socioeconomic form depending on the route chosen, and Brīvbode's modal distinctiveness is part of what recruits and retains its participants. PARAGRAPH #RCC9LM The modal choice is therefore also an ethical one. Brīvbode’s particular configuration of unpaid, informal, household-to-household labour is what allows consumption work to be performed as care, and care to be performed as a recognisable mode of circulation. SECTION #L38KUE It’s On Me: Networks, Gender, and the Transmission of Care PARAGRAPH #8JYYXC Wheeler and Glucksmann's processual dimension attends to how labour is distributed across the full span of a consumption process. In Brīvbode, this dimension is most visible in the extended divestment networks through which household surplus reaches the swapshop. The work that sustains Brīvbode is continuous with domestic consumption work which is consistently organised through women's labour. PARAGRAPH #PNGSGT Miller's (1998) research on shopping demonstrates that consumption is often organised around care for others rather than individual satisfaction, and that women frequently function as moral agents in household consumption as they are the ones acquiring, managing, and disposing of goods in relation to the needs of children, partners, and wider social networks. Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015) find the same gendered pattern in recycling: women typically take responsibility for sorting while men handle transport. The fieldwork conducted for this thesis reflects this consistently. Anna states it directly: "It's on me. I'm the one who supplies everyone with clothes and shoes." Silvija organises all divestment decisions in her household and says her husband "would just throw it in the bin." Men's role, where it appears, is typically transport and carrying the bags that women have sorted, selected, and prepared. PARAGRAPH #3BY9GH The reach of Brīvbode extends considerably beyond those who physically visit it. Several of the most embedded participants perform substantial divestment work not only for themselves but for neighbours, colleagues, and family members, functioning as logistics nodes through which others' surplus flows to the freeshop. Marija's neighbours give her things to take to Brīvbode as she is a frequent visitor and the role has naturalised into her social identity in the building. Māra coordinates pickups from at least five neighbours, takes requests for specific items, and is the only one of her immediate network who actually visits – the rest route their divestment through her. Anna's work colleagues prepare parcels for her to deliver: "They use me. They prepare the bags I need to bring to Brīvbode. And then they say: 'Can you look for something for my teenage daughter?'" What looks like consumption work performed on behalf of others is, in Tölg and Fuentes’s (2025) terms, also care for neighbours and for the imagined future users of the things — the logistical labour and the relational orientation are inseparable. PARAGRAPH #Y344XY Madara does divestment work for her aunt whose belief that worn objects carry the energy of previous owners prevents her from donating. In order to get to Brīvbode, the objects must pass through Madara first. "I know that most likely they would simply be thrown away or burned." The most laborious divestment case came from Aiga, who spent months coordinating the recirculation of her relatives' possessions after a relocation, making thirty trips to Brīvbode. A single call to a clearance firm would have resolved everything in one visit, Aiga says, but she chose the harder route because she could not allow things to be discarded: “Sometimes you really do want to just throw it out, but that inner feeling simply won’t let me.” This is consumption work in Bankovska’s (2020) sense of care not-work — labour that is unremunerated, hard to see as work from the outside, and yet performed because the alternative is unbearable. It is care as obligation that cannot be put down. PARAGRAPH #VCEUP7 Consumption work is both currently gendered and being transmitted along gendered lines. Kristīne takes her daughters to Brīvbode and uses the visits as occasions for explicit moral education: discussing why they are giving things away, what makes a good divestment decision, what is too worn to donate. She sometimes goes without them to avoid the tears when they want things back; other times the difficulty is the point. "It's also an opportunity to talk about things." The children are learning material quality, the ethics of giving, and the difference between good enough to donate and good enough only to discard — competencies that are simultaneously consumption-work skills and the dispositions of care that Bankovska (2020) shows being transmitted across generations in the everyday work of provisioning. PARAGRAPH #SZVP2G What neither sufficiency nor valuation quite revealed, the processual dimension makes visible: the labour of Brīvbode is gendered not only structurally but ethically — women carry it because they have always carried care, and the consumption-work skills it requires are inseparable from the care dispositions through which they are taken on. SECTION #75D5UH Conclusion PARAGRAPH #5YXGE6 This chapter has examined the labour that sustains freecycling in Brīvbode, finding it distributed across structural, ethical, and gendered dimensions that existing circular economy frameworks tend to overlook. Wheeler and Glucksmann’s consumption work concept names the structure: tasks that paid institutions would perform in formal retail or waste management contexts are here absorbed by unpaid volunteers and participants, distributed across modal and processual dimensions that stretch well beyond the freeshop itself. The feminist ethics of care and its recent applications to circular consumption (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), together with Bankovska’s (2020) care not-work and Graeber’s (2018) account of work as what just needs to be done, name the orientation: much of this labour is not transferred from institutions onto reluctant consumers but self-imposed through ethical commitment and care – activities people perform because they cannot bring themselves not to. Miller (1998) names who bears it: consistently and disproportionately women, from household sorting and routing to managing others’ generosity to transmitting these competencies to the next generation. PARAGRAPH #HM56MD Circular consumption requires substantial labour, and that labour is unevenly distributed. Sustainability of initiatives like Brīvbode depends on a structural condition – the sufficiency-oriented, time-rich, predominantly female volunteer and participant base that circular economy policy rarely names or supports (Hobson et al., 2021). Some of this labour is unreflexive and habituated – Aiga's inner feeling that prevents easy disposal, Marija's building logistics naturalised into her social role. Some is deliberate and effortful – Kristīne's category-by-category method, Madara working on her impulse-acquiring. Both are labour, but they are differently visible, and the unreflexive forms are the hardest to see and the hardest for policy to reach. PARAGRAPH #RX9JDU What Brīvbode reveals — and what makes it analytically valuable for circular economy debates — is that the absence of price does not produce a frictionless flow of materials. It produces a different kind of work: gendered, ethically motivated, absorbed into household routines, and sustained by people who have organised their lives to be able to do it. Recognising this work as both consumption work and care work is the first step toward circular economy policy that can see it, support it, and not depend on its invisibility. ### 9. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Elusive Consumption (#2EDLQU), Helene Brembeck, Karin M. Ekström, p. 31 Context: #2YF5Q4 Part I Grasping the Topic #RKYURH Morals and Metaphors: The Meaning of Consumption #95723B Why Worry Matching excerpt #9MY7FE: A whole series of other moral and practical arguments about proper consumption flow from the eating metaphor. Moderation is a good thing. Don't eat too quickly. Strong spices can give you indigestion. Chew thoroughly before you swallow. Don't eat food served by strangers. Give yourself time for digestion after a meal, etc. These all have equivalents in precepts about not spending all your money in one place, enjoying the things you have instead of buying new things, buying solid long-lasting items instead of flashy ones, and on and on. But urging moderation and conformity to community standards is not necessarily the best form of consumption, either for the individual, or society as a whole. Consumption is not always a moral balance between too little and too much. Environmental scientists and ecologists have pointed out many cases where recycling is actually harmful to the environment, where consuming more of certain products could be beneficial, or conserving is wasteful (Lilienfeld and Rathje 1998). 2. Source: Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture (Cultures of Consumption) (#3N7TTE), Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk, p. 39 Context: #LS8EXH List of Tables and Figures #ZFW7SB Everyday Practice and the Production and Consumption of Time #5N9ZRB Practice-Time Profiles Matching excerpt #EQUABH: In this instance, sequence is so much part of doing that a single error will spoil the entire performance. In other, more forgiving situations, taking too long, finishing too quickly or doing things in the wrong order signals incompetence but does not result in total failure. By way of illustration, the Mass Observation Study's report into the culture and organization of drinking in a UK town comments in detail on the phenomenon of 'drinking level' (Mass Observation 1987). Partly but not entirely due to the convention of buying rounds (each member of a party takes turns to buy drinks for everyone else), the rate at which an individual drinks is 'controlled' by a usually unstated but nonetheless effective convention of mutual synchronization. If anyone drinks 'too fast' or 'too slow', the balance of the whole is thrown out of kilter. 3. Source: Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture (Cultures of Consumption) (#3N7TTE), Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk, p. 15 Context: #LS8EXH List of Tables and Figures #RDUMKE Introduction #LWCQLP Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Matching excerpt #C378V6: 'Time' has become a central topic of debate in the academy, just as it has in public life. Experiences of time poverty and hurriedness, burnout and stress are staples of popular discussion, media hype and political concern. Some commentators have even go so far as to diagnose 'the arrival of time politics' (Mulgan 2005; Virilio 2006 [1977]). The scope of the debate is considerable, stretching from alarmist critiques to more positive evaluations which revel in the busyness and fast pace of city life. On one end are critics of hyper-consumerism, denouncing a 'too much, too fast' life-style. Social movements are trying to slow down the speed of life, campaigning for a new 'simplicity', for slow food, slow cities, slow conferences, even slow sex (Christensen 2007; Elgin 1993; Honoré 2004; Parkins and Craig 2006). In this view, material civilization in affluent, wealth-orientated consumer societies has been spinning out of control, and the pace of life is becoming too fast for personal well-being and environmental sustainability (Aldrich 2005; Schor 1999). On the other end stands a view that sees busyness as a sign of full and active participation in society, based on an historical analysis which shows people working less and having much more leisure than ever before (Easterlin 2001). 4. Source: Materiality (#R26U48), Daniel Miller, p. 90 Context: #49Y6EC MATERIALITY #AB85T2 A Materialist Approach to Materiality #FDT5X6 HIERARCHIES OF MATERIALITY Matching excerpt #GLPVYS: The idea that young converts are strong and independent and take what they want shows up best in changing attitudes toward marriage. A girl given in marriage by her father will be approached and told, "Come to church and be free. You can stay where you like and then your father must refund the brideprice." To the chiefs, the Catholic missions were a sickness: wives refuse to provide food, girls refuse marriage and go to live in town, and young men go outside to work and refuse to follow tradition. Yet seventy years later the chiefships thrive, and you can hear similar complaints made by elders against the young, although now the complaints are focused on their attending nightclubs or the individualizing effects of their spending too long in the cities or abroad. 5. Source: Materiality (#R26U48), Daniel Miller, p. 215 Context: #49Y6EC MATERIALITY #URXCRD Materiality and Cognition: #2N3LKT ANIMATION AND THE EMERGENCE OF INTELLIGENT THINGS Matching excerpt #K2ZXJN: First and foremost, this shift exposes culture as an obsolete explanatory factor for the material. Since Émile Durkheim, generations of scholars have crafted “the social life of things” out of preoccupation with the social life of man. For too long we have lived with the notion that the material is receptive to concepts that are projected onto it. This projectionist fallacy, the oppositional framework of culture and objecthood in which objects merely serve as substitutes for persons, falls apart as animated things, although responsive to human need and emotion, become effective in managing connective and analogical relations. 6. Source: How temporal orientations trigger, nurture and sustain deep engagement with consumption practices (#UGBANU), Benjamin Rosenthal, p. 13 Context: #4D6GKT How temporal orientations trigger, nurture and sustain deep engagement with consumption practices #ZALLEW Findings #VF5DGC How envisioned-future orientations sustain deep engagement Matching excerpt #ECLZJ6: "I hope to stay the way I am, not to lose myself too much, that's all... staying is good. 2,000 m is fine, 1,500 m is fine. I want to stay active, and healthy, not to become a boring person." (Helaine, 65) 7. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #DHZWSK Mikael Mikael, row 1372 | Disposal, flow of goods, intense circulation Matching coded excerpt #5LL7GM: S2: ...and it's like, I have the impression it's like, okay, put the things here, we make it very nice, you can... 00:33:43 - 00:35:43 S2: ...trade the things a bit, but you need to like talk to someone and then you can have it. S2: It's not that free for all. S2: But it also is like part of the, like the things that stay there for too long or something get recycled or... S2: But then I also have some kind of paranoia about recycling that's like... S2: ...when I do it properly, actually I'm just somehow... S2: ...there's an appearance of it being proper, but actually it's more like I get to feel good about it and then someone who works there just has to like get rid of it somehow. 8. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #DHZWSK Mikael Mikael, row 96 | Consumption work, volunteer work, work of disposal and acquisition Matching coded excerpt #F58RAZ: S2: ...and it's like, I have the impression it's like, okay, put the things here, we make it very nice, you can... 00:33:43 - 00:35:43 S2: ...trade the things a bit, but you need to like talk to someone and then you can have it. S2: It's not that free for all. S2: But it also is like part of the, like the things that stay there for too long or something get recycled or... S2: But then I also have some kind of paranoia about recycling that's like... S2: ...when I do it properly, actually I'm just somehow... S2: ...there's an appearance of it being proper, but actually it's more like I get to feel good about it and then someone who works there just has to like get rid of it somehow. 9. Source: My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries (#Y3KME8), Elizabeth Chin, p. 67 Context: #XJ352H Contents #6YPJY9 The Entries #3DJ7FB MY PURPLE SHOES Matching excerpt #W4WNVD: So, these purple shoes. Some people tell me they look like "space shoes." Really, people have actually said they remind them of that show Lost in Space . Personally, I don't think they look like space shoes at all. They're not really purple purple, but more a lilac color, and here's the good part: they're shiny metallic and kind of shimmery like a butterfly. They're loosely in the sport shoe vein, though not quite; the soles are a little high, so they don't look like a sneaker at all. You slip them on, and there's elastic that holds them on. Am I imagining things, or has shoe design really undergone some sort of radical transition in the last couple of years?—they're like these amazing sculptures! I had gone to Ross to buy long-sleeved shirts for work and since it's winter I always wear about three layers (witness today's undershirt, T-shirt, and sweater). I spent a long time finding a few shirts that were inexpensive that I liked and could wear to teach in, since I like to dress up a bit when I teach, not in suits or anything, but a change from what I normally wear at home. Formal-ish, without being stuffy and boring. I wasn't there to buy shoes, but I have a shoe thing and cruised the shoe section while I held seven shirts, having decided I would only allow myself to purchase five of them. I tried on a pair of zip-up boots that were $16.99 with that fake pony-fur stuff, very fun, but the heels were way too high. Then suddenly I saw those lilac shimmery shiny shoes and I couldn't believe they were in my size. I grabbed them, snatched them from that lower shelf, and thought: this is why I came here. 10. Source: ‘It will Keep Circulating’: Loving and Letting Go of Things in Swedish Second-hand Markets (#ZJUEY4), Anna Bohlin, p. 4 Context: #SSAEUN 'It will Keep Circulating': Loving and Letting Go of Things in Swedish Second-hand Markets #E744H2 Introduction #9RXY34 Passing On Matching excerpt #77HE79: During the autumn of 2017 I conducted participant observation and interviewed people as they arrived to donate goods in two locations. The first was a large charity shop, run by a church and the local municipality, which raises funds for both local and international social and aid work, and the second a municipal recycling station where four different non-profit organisations had placed containers for donations (Figure 3). 4 I had anticipated that people might feel uneasy about the fact that they were getting rid of things, and initially took care to stay in the background, and not ask too directly about that which was being donated. Yet, it soon became clear that people were very happy about to engage in conversation, letting me help them carry things from cars, open boxes, and pick things up for me to see (see Hebrok 2016: 9 for a similar experience at a Norwegian recycling station). 5 In fact, I quickly realized, I encountered people at moments when they felt very good about themselves and their actions, for a number of reasons. Approximate matches 1. Source: The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (#3LSRBZ), Tim Ingold, p. 287 Context: #6PPCBM Part II #76LAV7 Dwelling #6BU7XY Vision, hearing and human movement #MF4TKG THE SENSORY EXPERIENCE OF BLIND AND DEAF PEOPLE #RXARMJ Being blind Score: 0.402 Related excerpt #SK3TLM: One shrinks from whatever it is. It seems to be characterised by a certain stillness in the atmosphere. Where one should perceive the movement of air and a certain openness, somehow one becomes aware of a stillness, an intensity instead of an emptiness, a sense of vague solidity. 2. Source: The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (#3LSRBZ), Tim Ingold, p. 445 Context: #E9SHKF Part III #6JQS9J Notes #7BCLX8 CHAPTER FOURTEEN STOP, LOOK AND LISTEN Score: 0.381 Related excerpt #Y97B6Q: One can . . . recall the acoustic harshness of an uninhabited and unfurnished house as compared to the affability of a lived-in home, in which sound is refracted and softened by the numerous surfaces of the objects of personal life. Every building or space has its characteristic sound of 3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 72 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #WPPBPJ EMERGENCE, DISAPPEARANCE AND PERSISTENCE Score: 0.395 Related excerpt #6K7G77: These stocks also depend on differential qualities of persistence and endurance. As we are about to see, certain elements can remain dormant, no longer part of any living practice, but still available for future use. Others are much more perishable. In describing some of these features, the next few paragraphs give a sense of how the lives of selected elements unfold over time, and how they weave together. 4. Source: Uncontained accumulation: Hidden heterotopias of storage and spillage (#7BM5AQ), Sasha Newell, p. 2 Context: #29MY8X Uncontained accumulation: Hidden heterotopias of storage and spillage #23FBJ8 KEYWORDS Score: 0.404 Related excerpt #GB8LDR: by the door as people enter and exit dropping detritus as they go. Cleaning up, residents remove it and seek less visible spaces to put things they do not know what to do with: 'As people and things move through the home and fabricate its multiple temporalities and spatialities, gaps are opened into which stuff falls, and surfaces are cleared onto which things are placed' (Cwerner and Metcalfe 2003, 236). By the time we become aware such heaps exist, jumbling unwanted treasures, undiscordable refuse, and unused utilitarian things kept just in case, they have often already burst forth into visible space in ways that threaten the order of the home and the socially accepted structure of value. 5. Source: The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (#83R4U2), Gay Hawkins, p. 41 Context: #Y4M56L Contents #PCYBTK A Dumped Car Score: 0.394 Related excerpt #CYSBGK: Sebalb, in contrast, sticks closely to the qualitative character of abandoned things. Consider his reverie on a pile of mattresses: 6. Source: The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (#83R4U2), Gay Hawkins, p. 40 Context: #Y4M56L Contents #PCYBTK A Dumped Car Score: 0.385 Related excerpt #MT4T55: In writing about loss W. G. Sebald reminds us of the importance of detritus. For him, abandoned places and things have the power to reveal the reality of vanished lives. But this power is rarely acknowledged; instead, the world seems to be "draining itself." Why is this metaphor of the drain so unsettling? Could it be because drains facilitate such efficient disappearance? It's easy to forget things when elimination is so streamlined, when there is no possibility of careful deliberation. But do all the things we discard lapse into oblivion, drained of power and memory? Or do they outlive us, accumulating across the landscape, dumped but certainly not disappeared? 7. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #3X7JKL The circulation of things and things that sustain it #Z7Y86N Plural meanings of acquisition that sustain participation in Brīvbode Score: 0.38 Related paragraph #A99SUN: A related strong negative meaning for second hand acquisition holds that these items carry the energy of previous – often deceased – owners. Several participants mentioned this trope but adjusted it to their practice. Viesturs, half-laughing, keeps the spiritual language but reframes it institutionally: "Others say that things have some kind of energy, or the aura of previous owners... We're able to transform that. In a way, Brīvbode is also like a kind of purgatory for things." With this adjusted meaning Brīvbode can function as a threshold space in the object biographies where the weight of previous owners can be released. 8. Source: The Force of Things (#P7EWHQ), Jane Bennett, p. 5 Context: #VH85EA The Force of Things : Steps toward an Ecology of Matter #9M3W8D CONTENDING MATERIALITIES #PYT6RP THING-POWER I: TRASH Score: 0.391 Related excerpt #QV484C: the thing when your nose is overwhelmed by the dozens of scents that “have collected into strata in the department store air” 12 or when your thoughts are scrambled by the miles of shelving at a supermarket. There is a way, then, in which American materialism is antimateriality. Too much stuff in too quick succession equals the fast ride from object to trash. 9. Source: Not moving things along: hoarding, clutter and other ambiguous matter (#R9KEKQ), Neil Maycroft, p. 6 Context: #NQ7M35 Not moving things along: hoarding, clutter and other ambiguous matter #XSXRDB The board: Disorder, disposition and decay Score: 0.395 Related excerpt #L5HU63: It looked as if they were washing the floors in the house, and all the furniture bad for the time being been piled up there. On one table there even stood a broken chair, and next to it a clock with a stopped pendulum to which a spider had already attached its web. Near it, leaning its side against the wall stood a cupboard with old silver, decanters, and Chinese porcelain. On the bureau, inlaid with mother-of-pearl mosaic, which in places had fallen out and left only yellow grooves filled with glue, lay a various multitude of things: a stack of papers written all over in a small hand, covered by a marble paperweight, gone green, with a little egg on top of it, some ancient book in a leather binding with red-edges, a completely dried-up lemon no bigger than a hazelnut, the broken-off arm of an armchair, a glass with some sort of liquid and three flies in it, covered by a letter, a little piece of sealing- 10. Source: WITH and WITHOUT THINGS. AN INTRODUCTION (#ZNC4FL), Francisco Martínez, Tomás Errázuriz, p. 9 Context: #L58DJJ WITH AND WITHOUT THINGS. AN INTRODUCTION #CLTKXQ I SORT, THUS I INHABIT Score: 0.403 Related excerpt #3REDKR: In Living with Things (2007), which Gregson revisits in this theme issue, she called for an approach to consumption that also considers the riding, divesting, and disposal of things too. In this vein, and despite agreeing that things silently perform the task of socialization, Martínez remarks the need to keep some things in the dark because of their capacity to challenge our present life and sense of order, both physically and symbolically. In turn, storing stuff in basements allows the release of both things and emotions, placing certain items on standby while making room for new sides of the self to unfold. Interruptions and pauses thus become part of the domestic flow of things characterizing inhabitation. ### 10. Assistant This is a strong hypothesis — strong enough that I think it could be the spine of your conclusion, not just a paragraph. Let me lay out where it already lives in the Mikael draft, where the empirical material backs it, and a couple of moves that would sharpen it. ## The argument is already half-written, in #RX9JDU Your final paragraph of Chapter 5 says: *"the absence of price does not produce a frictionless flow of materials. It produces a different kind of work."* That's the throughput-friction claim in nuce. The hypothesis you're naming now extends it: it's not only that friction generates labor the metric ignores — it's that the friction is *constitutive*, not residual. A swapshop optimized for throughput would not be a swapshop. It would be a textile container with extra steps. Mikael himself says this almost verbatim in #5LL7GM / #F58RAZ: he distrusts the *appearance* of properness, the smoothness of the loop. "When I do it properly, actually I'm just somehow… there's an appearance of it being proper, but actually it's more like I get to feel good about it and then someone who works there just has to like get rid of it somehow." His paranoia is about frictionless circulation: the seamless loop is suspect precisely because it absorbs his moral residue without requiring anything of him. ## The frictions that make Brīvbode Brīvbode (already in your chapters) Read #9XAKTW and #82G2QE through this lens and almost every section turns into evidence: - **Friction as moral pause.** Viesturs reframing the shop as "a kind of purgatory for things" (#Z4WUR2) — objects need to *linger* to shed the energy of previous owners. A frictionless loop would not absolve anyone. - **Friction as valuation.** Without price, valuation moves into the open and onto volunteers (#U7QJHT, #KWPAYN). Anna sniffing the bag before opening it. Rasa's "filter" (#7X9BV4) holding items back for specific people. This is friction as care. - **Friction as restraint.** Madara learning to mentally substitute "exchange" for "free" (#CUBS5Q, #4HW9DD) — the practitioner *introduces* friction because the price-friction has been removed. Sufficiency is friction self-imposed. - **Friction as relational embedding.** Aiga's thirty trips instead of one clearance call (#Y344XY). She *chooses* the slower route because she cannot bear what frictionlessness would do. - **Friction as curatorial tactic.** Viesturs not putting items out when a reseller is in the room (#ERMRTL). Rasa: "the emptier the shelves, the more people find" (#KMD7AJ) — deliberately slowed presentation. - **Friction as the affective closure of divestment.** Givers who value *witnessing* circulation in Brīvbode versus the textile container, which is "too distanced to imagine who benefits" (#PQV5PN). The smooth loop is alienating. - **Friction as trial.** The possibility of bringing things back (#34Z7TB) — circulation deliberately doesn't terminate at the first acquisition. The two most quotable empirical anchors for the hypothesis itself: Aiga's thirty trips, and the wire offcuts (#HN8W7V) — items the volunteers know aren't being used but don't have the heart to refuse, because the giver's *imagined* third user is part of what holds the practice together. Pure throughput accounting would discard her bags as friction; ethnographically, those bags are doing the work. ## Where the literature backs you up You're closer to a publishable critique than you may realize. The throughput-vs-friction frame lines up cleanly with several pieces you already cite: - **Shove & Rinkinen 2023, #RP8YNG**: "If the primary ambition is efficient flow and use of resources and goods, then changes in patterns of consumption and reduction of resource use is secondary." Cite this as the explicit statement of the throughput logic you're criticizing. - **Hobson 2021, #UMYA27, #BKS58J**: the CE's "butterfly diagram" treats users as nodes around which loops revolve — exactly the framing that makes friction look like inefficiency rather than constitution. - **Tan & Yeoh, #273AZV**: "high recycling rates should not be conflated with high circularity rates." Same point at policy-metric level. - **McLaren & Niskanen, #AQCZ9W**: CE as an "eco-modernist technocratic concept" centered on flow. - **Welch et al. / Hobson on consumption work**: this is your bridge — the labor argument is the empirical wedge into the throughput frame. - **Bohlin 2019 (#ZJUEY4)**: people *want* to dwell at the moment of donation. Friction is part of the affective satisfaction. ## A sharpening move The current Mikael draft frames the punchline as labor: "a different kind of work." That's true and important — but it concedes more to the throughput logic than your hypothesis does. The labor frame says: *here is hidden cost the metric misses*. The friction frame says: *the metric measures the wrong thing, because the friction IS the practice*. The first invites compensation (recognize and support the labor); the second invites a deeper revaluation (a maximally efficient swapshop is not the goal, and not even desirable). Both arguments can coexist, but they have different political teeth. Your conclusion (#M9WQLY is empty? worth checking) is the place to make the stronger claim. Something like: *Brīvbode's value to circular economy thinking is not that it diverts tonnes from landfill efficiently — it is that it shows how the circulation of things is held together by the very moments throughput accounting treats as friction: the pause to evaluate, the lingering to release, the relational route chosen over the fast one, the witnessing that closes the divestment cycle affectively. A swapshop optimized as the metric would prefer would no longer be ethnographically recognizable as a swapshop.* That's a paragraph that earns its place. ### 11. User can you gimme a lucid nice intro to the hobson and circular economy stuff and the "closing the loop" paper ### 12. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `get_document` ```json { "id": "8ZKAT7" } ``` #### Tool call: `get_document` ```json { "id": "UMYA27" } ``` #### Tool call: `get_document` ```json { "id": "4AE86F" } ``` ### 13. Tool result: get_document DOCUMENT #8ZKAT7 Title: Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy Outline: - 1 #ECVDXM Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy - 1.1 #BWE4XA Abstract - 1.2 #7JJN4G Keywords - 1.3 #YYPBP6 1 Introduction - 1.3.1 #DJ6AEM Corresponding author: - 1.4 #S7EQE3 II What is the circular economy and how do we get there? - 1.5 #R4GEYE III Governing the circular economy: The case of WEEE and the modernist myth - 1.6 #75DDTN IV Distributing politics and markets in the CE - 1.7 #MWMXE8 V Being a circular economy citizen: Pathways to radical product service systems? - 1.8 #ACNZ3L VI Concluding comments - 1.9 #RNUQ2A Funding and Acknowledgements - 1.10 #QKAYNE References - 1.11 #T8RC4F Author biography ### 14. Tool result: get_document DOCUMENT #UMYA27 Title: The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy Outline: - 1 #6DJ9DS The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy - 2 #WE2KWR The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy - 2.1 #4S872F ABSTRACT - 2.2 #8N33DB Introduction: Circular Economy as ‘weak’ sustainability rebooted? - 2.3 #VACME2 The Circular Economy: from disparate sub-disciplines to holistic framework? - 2.4 #XK6L5Q The user-consumer in Circular Economy: beyond competitive prices and increased efficiencies - 2.5 #Z2MRHK Concluding comments: setting the agenda for an environmental politics of CE - 2.6 #TB7D85 Disclosure statement - 2.7 #G8THKN ORCID - 2.8 #TFBWD5 References ### 15. Tool result: get_document DOCUMENT #4AE86F Title: From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices: socio-spatial transformations in the Circular City Outline: - 1 #DHY6VD From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices: socio-spatial transformations in the Circular City - 2 #7TWE3G From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices: socio-spatial transformations in the Circular City - 2.1 #LKDJQD ABSTRACT - 2.2 #NE4XCN ARTICLE HISTORY - 2.3 #XUQXYU KEYWORDS - 2.4 #852FVL Disclosure statement - 2.5 #LT22DE ORCID - 2.6 #G9HZEE References ### 16. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "BWE4XA", "YYPBP6", "S7EQE3", "ACNZ3L" ], "expand": true } ``` #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "4S872F", "8N33DB", "XK6L5Q", "Z2MRHK" ], "expand": true } ``` #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "LKDJQD" ], "expand": true } ``` ### 17. Tool result: read DOCUMENT #8ZKAT7 Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy SECTION #BWE4XA Abstract EXCERPT #AKL7LC p. 0 Heightened concerns about long-term sustainability have of late enlivened debates around the circular economy (CE). Defined as a series of restorative and regenerative industrial systems, parallel socio-cultural transformations have arguably received less consideration to date. In response, this paper examines the contributions human geographical scholarship can make to CE debates, focusing on ‘generative spaces’ of diverse CE practices. Concepts infrequently discussed within human geography such as product service systems and ‘prosumption’ are explored, to argue that productive potential exists in bringing these ideas into conversation with ongoing human geographical research into practices, materialities, emergent political spaces and ‘everyday activism’. DOCUMENT #8ZKAT7 Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy SECTION #YYPBP6 1 Introduction EXCERPT #JYA93C p. 0 The need to go ‘beyond incremental efficiency gains to deliver transformative change’ (Preston, 2012: 1) is a long-standing entreaty within socio-environmental sustainability debates. However, what sort of change, transforming in what direction, and by what means remain undoubtedly highly contested questions. One framework that has of late received increasing political, research and civil society attention is that of the circular economy (CE) – the focus of this paper. EXCERPT #XRHFEU p. 0 The CE has been defined as: EXCERPT #QL2VAQ p. 0 an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design. It replaces the end-of-life concept with restoration, shifts towards the use of renewable energy, eliminates the use of toxic chemicals, which impair reuse EXCERPT #9NU2JN p. 0 and return to the biosphere, and aims for the elimination of waste through the superior design of materials, products, systems and business models. (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2013b: 2; see also Aldersgate Group, 2012; Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2013a, 2014; Lee et al., 2012) EXCERPT #Y3CQAJ p. 0 As such, moving towards a CE necessitates substantial transformations in design, production, consumption, use, waste and reuse practices. Overall, the goal is to keep valuable materials in circulation through a series of systemic SECTION #DJ6AEM Corresponding author: EXCERPT #4PDLPU p. 0 Kersty Hobson, School of Geography and the Environment, Dyson Perrins Building, South Parks Road, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK. EXCERPT #A6DWSM p. 0 Email: kersty.hobson@ouce.ox.ac.uk EXCERPT #TDE8FL p. 1 EXCERPT #J7WMYD p. 1 EXCERPT #FBN5U5 p. 1 feedback loops between life-cycle stages, powered through resource-efficient industrial processes. EXCERPT #KBL8VY p. 1 Calls for a significant shift towards a more CE through approaches such as closed loop manufacturing have existed for decades, emanating mostly from the field of Industrial Ecology (e.g. Lyle, 1994). While initially such calls were founded upon hypothetical systems of production and reuse, advances in technological, design and retrieval processes are rendering the theory of CE a more realistic proposition. This agenda has recently gained further impetus through political concern about issues such as 'resource security', believed to be creating price volatility and thus threatening long-term economic sustainability (e.g. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2012). As such, solutions that fundamentally reconfigure current production-consumption patterns have made their way into high-level political agendas of late. For one, the European Commission has stated that resource efficiency and a move towards the CE is one of its seven 'Europe 2020' flagship initiatives, as 'the EU has no choice but to go for the transition to a resource-efficient and ultimately regenerative circular economy' (European Commission, 2011: 1). This transition is argued by the European Commission as a promising pathway to regional prosperity, enabling the 'reindustrialisation of the European economy on the basis of resource-efficient growth that will last' (European Commission, 2011: 1). EXCERPT #D98KVL p. 1 As well as such high hopes at the European level, the UK Government's 'Resource Security Action Plan' (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2012) includes interventions that aim to foster the CE. Beyond formal policy circles, an array of non-governmental organizations is gathering around the possibilities of the CE. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, for example, was founded with the sole purpose of promoting the CE and has been gaining notable political and business traction recently, such EXCERPT #MUW9UM p. 1 as being placed front and centre at the 2014 World Economic Forum (see Confinio and Holtum, 2014). EXCERPT #EQ56XU p. 1 Given all of the above, the impetus for this paper is that it is arguably apposite and timely to interrogate the implications of the CE. Extant academic, policy and business-led analyses frame transformations towards the CE as predominantly issues of innovation, technical systems, fiscal and business incentives, and reformulated business models. While these interventions are not dismissed here, this paper is prompted by the observation that, within prevailing CE debates, little has been said about the socio-political implications and possibilities for shifting current production-consumption-use-waste practices. In addition, scant consideration has been given to other 'transformative' pathways and practices, currently elided by a focus on industrial systems and sustained economic growth. As such, crucial questions require greater consideration, such as the forms and processes of governance that would facilitate an effective and equitable CE. In addition, what are the implications of a CE for quotidian spaces and practices, as the patterns and rhythms of everyday socio-materiality are potentially reconfigured? Is the CE yet another iteration of capitalist crisis, reproduction and survival (Harvey, 2010, 2006), or does it productively merge disparate discourses and actors to garner much-needed action around the manifold issues of global sustainability? And what forms of research/intervention might critical social scientists such as human geographers contribute to explore the above questions, informed by which streams of conceptual and empirical debate? EXCERPT #PD7DJG p. 1 This paper aims to examine some of these questions, arguing that human geographers are well placed to make critical contributions to debates about the CE, given the fundamental disciplinary understanding that 'Production is... entangled with biophysical, social, political and cultural processes' (Sheppard, 2011: EXCERPT #WXYE3U p. 2 EXCERPT #A8XNAJ p. 2 EXCERPT #88RBG4 p. 2 324; see also Berndt and Boeckler, 2011). In making this argument, this paper adopts a generative stance (e.g. Head and Gibson, 2012). That is, it aims to locate and foster emergent research spaces, with an eye to the 'virtual presences' (Dittmer, 2014: 388) of contingent futures that remain underexplored within prevailing CE frameworks and advocates. As the concept of the CE touches on so many processes, peoples and places, no one paper can offer a complete dissection of its contents and implications. Therefore this paper focuses predominantly on questions of socio-material practices as a key area where human geographical debate has arguably much to contribute. Specifically, it aims to bring work around materiality, emergence, and everyday activism into conversation with concepts less often discussed in human geography – such as product service systems and 'prosumption' – to map out fertile areas of debate and research. In doing so, the paper begins with an elaboration of the concept of the CE, discussing existing research that intersects human geography with industrial ecology. It then discusses some of the governmental implications of the CE, drawing on an example of electronic waste. The final section examines the possibilities for citizen engagement and reconfigured material practices around the CE, suggesting possible sites and topics for future research. DOCUMENT #8ZKAT7 Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy SECTION #S7EQE3 II What is the circular economy and how do we get there? EXCERPT #67PAF4 p. 2 Fundamentally, recent debates about the CE respond to the perceived ineffectiveness of existing sustainability measures, in light of proclamations that global production-consumption systems remain, and are becoming increasingly, environmentally and socio-politically unsustainable (Rockstrom et al., 2009; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009). In this climate, ideas of the CE can, and arguably are, becoming potent and reassuring discourses of a sustainable future. EXCERPT #RSXV9L p. 2 In this section, the concept of the CE will be unpacked further, along with a consideration of some of the political agendas behind its current rise. It is argued here and in following sections that some of the strategies currently in use to foster the CE are in danger of repeating the failures of 'weak ecological modernization' (Lane and Watson, 2012), as they sidestep pressing socio-political issues across scales and spaces. EXCERPT #EBN45J p. 2 Why, then, does the CE matter? At the global level, resource use has continued to grow rapidly in the past few decades, spurred on particularly by economic growth in Asia (Schandl and West, 2010). Thus, the essential absolute (not relative) decoupling of resource use from living standards is far from taking place (Dasgupta and Ehrlich, 2013; Jackson 2009). Not that positive inroads have been completely absent in recent years. There have been gains from energy efficiency measures (Willis and Eyre, 2011) and notable increases in recycling rates, e.g. 43 per cent of UK domestic waste is now recycled (Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2014). However, the overall picture is less than positive. A great deal of recycled material ends up 'down-cycled' and non-domestic recycling rates are less healthy, e.g. 75 per cent of construction and demolition waste still goes to landfill (Vefago and Avellaneda, 2013). EXCERPT #ENHUAJ p. 2 One plausible reason for the above is the predominance of 'weak' ecological modernization policy frameworks and interventions in post-industrial countries over the past few decades (e.g. see Lane and Watson, 2012). With an emphasis on continued economic growth and neoliberal governmental/market-based interventions (Bakker, 2010; Bridge, 2011, 2013), such approaches have been roundly critiqued as ineffective at addressing the core causes of environmental unsustainability. Instead, their emphasis on 'win-win' scenarios fails to question the status quo and offers weak policy instruments and easily co-opted discourses of green capitalism and consumerism (e.g. Dauvergne EXCERPT #3DYZTL p. 3 EXCERPT #V9WPZL p. 3 EXCERPT #ZPL96Z p. 3 and LeBaron, 2012; Prudham, 2009). Yet, even if recent analyses are only partially accurate, such approaches have a fast-approaching expiry date. Semi-apocalyptic proclamations suggest we are 'sleepwalking into a prolonged era of resource-related strife' (e.g. Lee et al., 2012: xiv), where food, minerals and water resources are stretched to breaking by over-extraction, compounded by geographically and socially uneven access and rights (e.g. McMahon, 2013; Rockstrom et al., 2009). EXCERPT #2G8E4F p. 3 One facet of this bleak picture is the issue of 'critical resource security'. Here resources key to the production of goods and services are at heightened risk of becoming unattainable within a matter of years (e.g. House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, 2011; US Department of Energy, 2010; European Commission, 2011). In 2010 the EC released a list of 14 crucial minerals, such as antimony, graphite, magnesium and tungsten. Although not nouns that trip off the tongue in everyday talk, these minerals are currently vital components in goods and services many of us take for granted. For example, antimony is used in medications and pharmaceutical products and indium in LCDs, with both of them predicted to become inaccessible within the next 20 years (Cohen, 2007). EXCERPT #H8ABJD p. 3 How, then, does a mineral become classified as in danger of being critically scarce? Not an uncontested classification, it rests upon evaluations of which minerals are (a) geologically rare and/or (b) financially unviable for extraction due to geological dispersion and/or (c) have a high risk supply due to political instability or centralized control in countries with the highest concentration, such as tantalum in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo (European Commission, 2010). As such, critical resource scarcity contains within it complex historical, geopolitical and socio-material relations. Geological patterns and the locations of key minerals intersect with a continued drive for primitive accumulation (Bridge, 2011), taking EXCERPT #VW5KKK p. 3 place in locations not easily rendered governable under current forms of variegated neoliberalism (Bakker, 2010). Political geographical analysis has indeed underscored the inextricable relationship between the physical properties of minerals and other resources (oil, carbon), and the forms of (often far from progressive) politics that arise around their acquisition, use and control (e.g. Le Billon, 2008; Huber, 2008; Kennedy, 2014; Mitchell, 2009). For example, Emel et al.'s work on sovereignty and mining has underscored the mechanisms by which valuable and increasingly rare minerals are rendered accessible beyond their geological locations. These mechanisms hinge upon complex interplays between global capital and states that are fundamental to 'constructing a specifically national mode of territorial sovereignty' (Emel et al., 2011: 70). As such, the issue of critical resource scarcity raises pressing questions of capital, power and their uneven spatial manifestations, which human geographers have proven adept at illuminating. EXCERPT #5QRMKE p. 3 One question that follows on from the above is how then to intercede in a socially and environmentally progressive manner. One tactic has been to lay bare the myriad injustices at the heart of some rare mineral extraction. For example, the campaign 'Raise Hope for Congo' highlights the violence perpetuated by 'mineral conflict', including naming and shaming electronics companies that fail to source 'conflict free' minerals (see http://www.raisehopeforcongo.org/companyrankings ). Uncovering exploitative socio-political relations embedded within everyday 'things' has been framed as a 'radical' political strategy within and beyond human geography (e.g. Hartwick, 2000). Here, the social and environmental conditions of production are rendered partially visible through, for example, life cycle labelling and campaigning. This approach is argued as a valid tactic to open up spaces for 'a new politics of consumption' that works to illuminate the 'connections between precommodity and postcommodity phases of products' EXCERPT #5B4F9Y p. 4 EXCERPT #DKQMCS p. 4 EXCERPT #637AUW p. 4 (Hultman and Corevellec, 2012: 2414). However, such an approach assumes much. For example, that a label on a product is able to significantly alter consumption patterns, despite considerable evidence otherwise (e.g. Auld and Gulbrandsen, 2010; Cowburn and Stockley, 2005; Eden, 2011; Grankvist et al., 2004). It also averages out the contingencies of commodity chain governance, assuming a certification label, for example, is able to adequately represent the variations in practices along a product's life cycle (see McDermott, 2012). And it arguably narrows the political register through which citizens can and do engage with issues of consumption, 'ethical' or otherwise (e.g. see Barnett et al., 2005; Cook et al., 2007). EXCERPT #UTCFYK p. 4 Indeed, given the projections that numerous crucial minerals will become inaccessible, whether their sourcing takes place unjustly or not, it is their substitutability and recoverability that has become a focus for industry, research and government (e.g. Piesing, 2013). At first glance, this might suggest merely extending existing resource practices, such as more recycling of goods containing crucial minerals. While this is part of the picture, the quote that opened this paper underscored how a CE is deemed to necessitate that all aspects of production-consumption be open to scrutiny and potentially recalibrated. This includes designing goods that last longer (Cooper, 2005; Brook Lyndhurst, 2011) and from which reusable materials can be more easily recovered. Also necessary is the use of renewable energy during manufacturing processes and the reuse or 'return to the biosphere' of all materials. EXCERPT #96B3T5 p. 4 Such propositions are not new, having been debated for decades, mostly within the field of industrial ecology. This sub-discipline began synthesizing developments in ecology, systems theory and environmental science from the 1960s onwards (Deutz, 2009; Deutz and Frostick, 2009). Although a diverse field of writing, a key insight from industrial ecology is that ecosystem principles of organization and EXCERPT #BHSMLN p. 4 function could, in theory, offer a model for industrial system design. Such systems could be formed to repeatedly cycle biological (e.g. water) or technical (e.g. PET) nutrients through multiple productive lifetimes of use. Attendant notions of CE design, production and reuse/recycling have been further developed, such as McDonough and Braungart's (2010) writing on 'cradle to cradle' concepts (see also Lyle, 1994), which have contributed to a now lively field of research and practice in sustainable design (e.g. Lilley, 2009). In addition, small-scale institutions that aim to bring theory into practice now exist, such as the Centre for Sustainable Design in Surrey, UK; the Geneva-based Product-Life Institute; and the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, based in the Netherlands and San Francisco. Thus, ideas that have existed on paper since the 1960s are now coming to life, made feasible given advances in materials science, design practice, information technology and governance mechanisms (Preston, 2012). EXCERPT #EFQZLN p. 4 To date, human geographers have engaged little with questions of the CE, closed loop manufacturing and industrial ecology, although there are notable exceptions. For example, researchers have explored the planning and development of eco-industrial parks in the USA. Such parks are considered an essential component of creating CE systems, as companies can co-locate to facilitate the material interchange and 'energy cascading' necessary for closed production-consumption loops (Gibbs and Deutz, 2005; Gibbs et al., 2005). This research has found that, while viable on paper and framed as tenable regional growth strategies by policy makers, the development of such parks have taken place with little acknowledgement of, and engagement with, all-important contextual socio-political processes, creating less-than-successful outcomes (Gibbs et al., 2008). As such, this research highlights the scope and need for critical analysis of the socio-political and economic mechanisms and EXCERPT #B2FETY p. 5 EXCERPT #DCN94N p. 5 EXCERPT #TE69K8 p. 5 pathways proposed and enacted under the name of the CE. This includes the governmental interventions that aim to foster business and broader socio-economic conditions amenable to the CE, which – as argued in the next section – have to date re-embedded existing regimes of governance and failed to give credence to all that is at stake under the auspices of the CE while espousing significant and transformative societal change. DOCUMENT #8ZKAT7 Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy SECTION #ACNZ3L VI Concluding comments EXCERPT #NB8CR8 p. 11 This paper has aimed to bring recent and growing debates around ideas of the CE into conversation with some facets of human geographical research. The aim is to outline how research into a CE requires much broader analytical lenses than are currently deployed, given the profound 'transformative change' advocates speak of. The purpose here was to provisionally locate generative spaces and practices that embody a CE which goes beyond re-jigged industrial systems and business models. Rather, the case is made that any consideration of the CE must encompass forms of 'everyday activism' that foreground the 'vital materialism' (Gregson et al., 2010: 853) necessary to rethink, re-envision, recreate, reuse and 'move on' the goods and services that currently meet everyday needs. In other disciplines, researchers and practitioners talk of addressing unsustainable production and consumption through frameworks such as product service systems. This (perhaps rather dry) phrase is not found a great deal in human geographical work, but it does intersect with – and arguably has much to contribute to – research that explores practices embedded within, and enacted through, multi-scale socio-technical systems (Davies et al., 2014; Watson, 2012). EXCERPT #4G9UV6 p. 11 Advocates of the CE appear to consider the role of citizens as being the acceptance (or not) of practices that have been formulated on their behalf by designers, engineers, economists and policy-makers. One key aim of this paper has been to highlight how this presents an impoverished view of the properties and capacities that new assemblages of the CE are bringing forth, or could potentially create. That is, a seemingly narrow set of practices and spaces for citizen action (e.g. the High Street) are supplemented and/or challenged by the multifarious practices of the designer-consumer-user-repairer citizen. Indeed, as mentioned above, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation suggests that a new contract is emerging between business and the consumer. In their understanding, this relates to a direct and legally binding agreement between two or more parties. Yet this paper is essentially arguing that broader notions of a contract can be evoked here, where roles, competencies and responsibilities are redistributed and reconfigured throughout the lifetime of products and services, recalibrating the social relations and arrangements that currently favour the purchasing-ownership-disposal model of citizen-consumer practices. Such socially transformative enactments of the CE are thus implicit but under-explored within current debates, and this paper has aimed to highlight the potential for rich engagement, through both further conceptual and empirical exploration. ### 18. Tool result: read DOCUMENT #UMYA27 The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy SECTION #4S872F ABSTRACT EXCERPT #A5NZ9C p. 1 Circular Economy (CE) is now a key governance framework that aims to reconfigure how value is extracted from resources. Despite its widespread uptake, CE commentary to date tends towards descriptive and/or celebratory. In response, in this paper I outline some ways that environmental politics researchers have much to contribute to CE research, arguing that current examples of CE policies and practices potentially accelerate resource use into this century. A key weakness is how proponents frame us all as particular forms of ‘user-consumers’. Such framings fail to account for what is at stake for all of us as part of the CE project: and I conclude this paper by posing several key research questions, to encourage more critical environmental politics research on and around issues of CE. EXCERPT #XLD4N6 p. 1 KEYWORDS Circular Economy; consumption; consumer-user DOCUMENT #UMYA27 The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy SECTION #8N33DB Introduction: Circular Economy as ‘weak’ sustainability rebooted? EXCERPT #GXGZR3 p. 1 The pages of this journal have seen many ‘big picture’ environmental frameworks emerge, evolve, and/or become eclipsed since its inception three decades ago. The reverberations of many conceptual (‘sustainable development’) and institutional (e.g. UNFCC) interventions are still very much alive and regularly appear herein: while new frameworks continue to emerge alongside calls for systemic transformations (e.g. European Environment Agency 2018) in the face of accelerated resource use and climate change (International Resource Panel 2019). Here I discuss one such framework that has, in the past decade or so, received notable and increasing political and research attention: that of Circular Economy (CE). I aim to argue that – while CE debates and interventions look very much like continuations of extant environmental frameworks – they signal significant and potentially highly problematic shifts in the scale and sites of intervention in systems of resource use and re-use. Overall, I aim to make the case for greater engagement in this journal with the multiple facets of the CE, to add much-needed EXCERPT #2ZMTJS p. 1 EXCERPT #JT5JZE p. 1 EXCERPT #Z3ZEF6 p. 2 EXCERPT #VKQTL6 p. 2 critical voices to the celebratory and depoliticised reflections that have dominated this literature to date. EXCERPT #34J5F8 p. 2 For those not familiar with the term, CE frameworks aim to promote and normalise a suite of mechanisms that direct resource flows into 'loops' of continued use (repair, re-use, recycle, etc.) to purposefully minimise the 'waste and pollution' from prevailing systems (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2017a). One definition argues that it stands as: EXCERPT #SF6H7V p. 2 'an alternative to a traditional linear economy (make, use, dispose) in which we keep resources in use for as long as possible, extract the maximum value from them whilst in use, then recover and regenerate products and materials at the end of each service life' (Wrap 2019, no page) EXCERPT #C6LMQF p. 2 Although CE ideas build upon decades-long work from fields such as Industrial Ecology (e.g. Lowe and Evans 1995) and Sustainable Design, only recently has there been attempts to bring such disparate sub-disciplines together, envisaging nothing short of recalibrated economic systems. In response, there has been a notable upswing of interest in CE from governance and policy institutions along with academic researchers and non-governmental organisations. For example, the European Union as well as the governments of Canada, Wales, and Spain all now have prominent CE strategies. China was an early adopter, passing the Law for the Promotion of the Circular Economy in 2008. These strategies ambitiously aim to save resources and energy and map out the ways in which key regional development and prosperity goals can be met (European Commission 2015). In addition influential economic institutions, for example the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation and the World Economic Forum have taken up the language of the CE and international non-governmental organisations like Ellen MacArthur Foundation (see https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org ) and Circle Economy ( https://www.circle-economy.com ) work directly with a range of high-level institutions and sectors to bring the concepts of CE to life. As such, it seems CE is a framework whose time has come. EXCERPT #7N76K7 p. 2 However, many questions remain. While some insightful CE-focused work has appeared in Environmental Politics (see Fitch-Roy et al. 2019), to date most CE research has been published in journals whose remit is not critical-political analysis per se (e.g. 'Journal of Cleaner Production' and 'Resources Conservation and Recycling'). As a result, CE research often describes and/or compares national policies (e.g. McDowall et al. 2017); or focusses on specific supply chains and/or sustainable business models (Bocken et al. 2016, Geissdoerfer et al. 2017: see Ghisellini et al. 2016, Tukker 2015 for further analysis of CE publications). While insightful, the general tenor of this literature mirrors many comments about the CE in general, that it is lacking in 'critical analysis' (Korhonen et al. 2018, p. 38). Such comments suggest that there are many foundational questions about EXCERPT #8NYVU5 p. 3 EXCERPT #XZQRMC p. 3 the CE that remain under-explored: questions that must be addressed if the CE really is to act as 'a framework for an economy that is restorative and regenerative by design' (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2017a, no page), and not just another reboot of past sustainability frameworks. While some wide-ranging critiques of the CE project already exist (see Zink and Geyer 2017, Moreau et al. 2017, Korhonen et al. 2018), here I aim to raise questions about what the CE currently is, and what it could/needs to be, if it is to deliver the scale and forms of transformation proponents claim are required. EXCERPT #CXWVEV p. 3 On the one hand, it would be relatively straightforward to argue that, in essence, CE is a framework that rebrands and repackages decades-long 'weak sustainability' agendas. Here a focus on continued economic growth has created and entrenched various forms of 'green accumulation' (see Goodman and Salleh 2013), which has done little to transform prevailing economic systems, norms, and practices. However, in the next section, I make the case that the CE is potentially something more than (green) 'business as usual'. Instead, myriad policies and interventions brought together under a CE framework contain incongruous and problematic assumptions and mechanisms that potentially signal new sites and spaces of green accumulation, which together potentially accelerate the very problems the CE looks to address. In particular – and in line with my long-standing research interests in consumption, everyday practices, and sustainability (e.g. see Hobson 2013) – I focus in the subsequent section on one particular suite of problems with current conceptualisations of the CE: the circular 'user-consumer'. I argue that the role CE proponents ascribe for us all in the project – of choosing better business models and engaging in 'win win' everyday practices (e.g. forms of the 'sharing economy') – underplays what is actually at stake for us all, if the CE is to be as transformative as it promises and indeed needs to be, given ensuing climate emergencies and escalating global resource use. DOCUMENT #UMYA27 The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy SECTION #XK6L5Q The user-consumer in Circular Economy: beyond competitive prices and increased efficiencies EXCERPT #BKS58J p. 9 Welch et al. (2017) argue that there is a curious incongruence at the heart of Figure 1. To date, the majority of CE debates and research have focussed on products, materials, markets, and value extraction from specific energy and/or resource life cycles: the materials and processes that constitute the CE. Yet it is the ‘consumer’ and ‘user’ – all of us, the creators, perpetuators, and subjects of the economy – that have central place in the EMF ‘butterfly’ diagram, as the nodes around which CE circular loops and cascades revolve and return to (Hobson et al. , forthcoming ). As such, how our roles and agency are framed and enacted is a crucial component of the successes or failings of CE interventions. Or as Korhonen et al. have put it (2018, p. 41), ‘the new consumption culture is a critical part of the circular economy in its effort to reduce the nature-society-nature linear throughput flow of materials and energy.’ EXCERPT #BHJL6S p. 9 What, then, is signalled by a ‘new consumption culture’ under the CE? How do proposed ‘alternative’ economic systems intersect with, and impact upon, us all as citizens and consumers? While these are not completely novel questions and some critical work has started to examine potential CE social impacts and how to measure them (see Pitkänen et al. 2020), my interest here is more how the ‘user-consumer’ of Figure 1 is conceptualised within CE frameworks. That is, within imagined potential CE ‘futures’ (see Bauwens et al. 2020) what are our roles, based on what assumptions about our capabilities, interests, and agency? EXCERPT #ME8MY5 p. 9 From the perspective of EMF as well as some academic literature (e.g. Camacho-Otero et al. 2017, Wurster and Schulze 2020), ‘consumer acceptance’ of, or ‘buy in’ to, new circular products and services are key (e.g. Hobson and Lynch 2016, Mylan et al. 2016). This claim makes some intuitive sense given the need for drastic reductions in aggregate energy and resource use in the face of ever-increasing global consumerism. It also makes sense given the prevailing CE tenets as outlined above. That is, how new business and market development opportunities can be realised, in part, through recalibrating supply chains (e.g. Pan et al. 2015) and creating new ‘circular’ business models (Lewandowski 2016) that keep the consumer doing exactly that: consuming. EXCERPT #47382C p. 9 What, if any, are the problems with having ‘consumer acceptance’ as our key role in the CE? I argue that problems with this framing are both material and socio-economic. For one, the idea of ‘consumer acceptance’ or ‘buy in’ evokes a predominantly passive role for us all. It assumes that the form new EXCERPT #CHFEUN p. 10 EXCERPT #ZNQGRU p. 10 market offers will take – whether a redesigned ‘eco’ product, or a mix of product and services – can and will embody the overall aims of reducing resource and energy use. Thus, little insight or input is required from the consumer other than making the correct purchase decision and possibly remembering to recycle once the product has lost its use-value. This is a framing that flies in the face of the profound socio-economic transformations that CE proponents suggest the framework will usher in. EXCERPT #APZSUS p. 10 Indeed, the tools being brought to bear on greater consumer acceptance emphasise ‘designing in’ sustainability and circularity to goods and services. The European Commission, for one, has foregrounded ‘Ecodesign’ as key in its CE agenda, creating ‘more efficient products to reduce energy and resource consumption’ ( https://ec.europa.eu/growth/industry/sustainability/ecodesign_en ). This is a logical and much-needed move: but also one that assumes that, for example, most of the work of circularity is done in the design and end-of-life stage of a product, not in its use (e.g. Suckling and Lee 2015, Bridgens et al. 2019). Excavation of the much-repeated claim that 80% of a product’s environmental damage is established during design activity shows there is little veracity in such assumptions across all products (see Hobson 2019). Therefore, in what ways, for how long, and to what ends certain goods and services are taken up, used, and disposed of become key questions, placing the user-consumer as a central and active agent in the CE, rather than just someone accepting or rejecting what is on offer. In short, the ‘user-consumer’ is more than a semi-passive node through which materials flow, as in Figure 1: but how much more, and in what ways, remain open questions. EXCERPT #7QG5FA p. 10 In addition, the logic of ‘consumer acceptance’ invariably requires that new products and services are able to compete in and through existing market mechanisms: price signals, novelty, and quality. When this is the case, research has shown that often consumer evaluations of ‘circular business models’ – such as hiring or leasing goods rather than owning them, or buying products designed to be repaired and/or have longer use-life – suggest we are a long way off from securing widespread ‘acceptance’ of new business offers. Although there is clear willingness by participants to pay more and proffer concern for the environmental impacts of one’s consumption (ING 2020), in reality, more ‘circular’ market offers are often seen as inconvenient, too costly, and/or requiring non-existent trust in services and/or providers (e.g. see Hobson et al. 2018). In addition, research into attitudes towards reuse and refurbishment show similar trends, along with a lack of take-up of product ‘take back’ schemes (e.g. Ylä-Mella et al. 2015, Hobson et al. 2018): a crucial stage in moving materials back into the CE loops (as in Figure 1). As such, it appears that in the current marketplace, CE goods and services cannot out-compete existing offers. EXCERPT #LCWDSE p. 11 EXCERPT #55RLJA p. 11 One might conclude from this that key is to keep trying to bridge the ‘engagement gap’ between consumers’ expressed willingness to pay more for circular goods, with their lack of uptake of actual practices (ING 2020). Here, some claim the task is ‘Plugging consumer awareness gaps’ alongside ‘more innovative design’ to ‘make repair easier and cheaper, and to make products easier to share and resell’ (ING 2020, p. 9). The point here is not to argue such moves will make zero difference. But rather to place such assertions in the context of decade-long debates about public ‘attitude-action’ gaps, which erroneously assume that greater knowledge is the key to increased ‘sustainable consumption’ (see Hobson 2013). As such, CE advocates are continuing to endorse an almost mythical just-out-of-reach-but-on-the-horizon future: one where designers and business innovators crack the challenge of formulating high-uptake, dematerialised, and appealing consumer-orientated circular business models, turning us all into ‘Circular Champions’ (ING 2020). And as such, relying on the market ideologies, dynamics, and mechanisms that have facilitated hyper-consumerism and its various components (e.g. ‘fast fashion’) may set the CE up for failure while making a good job of it seeming to be otherwise. This brings us back to the point made above, that the ‘economy’ part of the CE has received little critical attention to date, particularly by its public proponents: a point that some ecological economists are well-equipped to unpack further (e.g. see Korhonen et al. 2018, Figge and Thorpe 2019, Millar et al. 2019). EXCERPT #4ZRAHN p. 11 One response to the above points might be, quite reasonably, to argue the notion of ‘consumer acceptance’ over-simplifies the role as laid out for all in popular framings of CE. Here, we are also charged with taking part in forms of ‘Collaborative Consumption’ or the ‘Sharing’ Economy’ (e.g. Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2017a), which are argued to offer diverse means and spaces for us all to consume differently. Talk of the Sharing Economy (SE) for example envisages: EXCERPT #66M2DY p. 11 ‘a future of consumption that embraces not only novel business models and consumption practices, but also novel norms of consumption and emotional and motivational engagements in consumption’ (Welch et al. 2017, no page). EXCERPT #2D222Q p. 11 Examples of the SE often include car or ride-sharing services (e.g. Zipcar or BlaBlaCar); equipment borrowing or pooling services (e.g. ‘tool libraries’); or apps that locate and enable the redistribution of food that would otherwise go to waste (e.g. Olio: see also Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2013). Although there is considerable debate about what constitutes actual ‘sharing’ as opposed to garnering income from assets that mirror established rental services (as in AirBnB: see above), the point here is that SE advocates see little need for critical analysis of this suite of practices. For one, it is claimed that the sharing economy provides heightened efficiencies and ‘seamless’ connections between provider and consumer’ (Ernst & Young 2015, p. 14 EXCERPT #B5JWCU p. 12 EXCERPT #89BTVL p. 12 see also Botsman and Rogers 2011). Some research does indeed back-up the positives of the SE. There is evidence that renting rather than owning a car brings down resource use (Meijkamp 1998). And that collectives are forming, to interact differently with materials possessions, thus offering potentially positive ways of rethinking our expectations of, and interactions with, the resources around us, and indeed, each other (e.g. see Cohen and Munoz 2016). EXCERPT #8EFZWA p. 12 There are also critiques. These argue that, in sum, renting, borrowing, exchanging, and/or pooling resources takes place in contexts where access is not always seamless and impacts not always evenly felt. That is, participating in the SE can require time, money, human and social capital, assets, skills, and capabilities that are not evenly distributed amongst populations to begin with (see Hobson et al. forthcoming). All are potentially further impacted by the SE, for better or worse (e.g. Appau et al. 2015; Schor 2016, Murillo et al. 2017). Indeed, much more detailed empirical work on the redistributive impacts of forms of sharing is sorely needed, as some work to date suggest that localised and/or collective environmental actions can act as scaled-down forms of 'green accumulation' along lines of class, ethnicity, and education (e.g. see Franklin et al. 2011, Norgaard et al. 2011). In addition, research has highlighted how SE participation, rather than enabling greater convenience and cost-efficiency at the tap of an app, enacts diverse forms of ethics, relating, and belonging (e.g. Richardson 2015, Holmes 2018) in ways that do not necessarily foreground the lessening of overall environmental impacts of practices (Gregson et al. 2015). EXCERPT #AGRU2E p. 12 As such, the complexities, contingencies, and less than 'win win' realities of the SE in practice rarely feature in mainstream CE advocacy. This is understandable, given how such insights highlight problems inherent in the systems that CE proponents claims to be reconfiguring without much disturbance of the current norms regarding the economy. However, I want to end by arguing that highlighting what is at stake in the CE – in what ways and to what ends – is crucial if its stated goals are going to prove anything more than rhetoric, particularly given the large-scale societal transformations it is charged with bringing about (e.g. European Commission 2015). From the perspective of the user-consumer, this is because many CE practices require that we all go beyond the modus operandi of consumerism (price, convenience: to buy or not to buy via the tapping of an app.). They rather ask that we are willing and able to have 'emotional and motivational engagements' (European Commission 2015) that recalibrate our relations with the socio-materialities of everyday lives, and each other. EXCERPT #TSWWNM p. 12 That is, what the CE asks of our everyday lives may, at first glance, seem like a small ask: swapping out one consumption practice for another, or (re)learning how to fix your toaster. And yet social researchers have highlighted the manifold cultural, social, and historical meanings attached to consumption practices (e.g. EXCERPT #K97QUS p. 13 EXCERPT #DUTG22 p. 13 Miller 1998, Shove and Warde 2002), as well as their place as habitual, normalised, and intertwined parts of our everyday material realities (Mylan 2015). Such intertwining means that adopting a particular ‘circular’ business model has potential knock-on effects throughout our lives. For example, does time spent repairing goods – that is, the ‘consumption work’ (see Wheeler and Glucksmann 2016) required of us all by the CE – mean there is less time available for other forms of ‘circularity’ in one’s life, thus excluding one from other SE opportunities? And do forms of social and cultural capital gained from, say, participating in a ‘Repair Café’ facilitate (or not) other relationships and practices, thus ‘spilling over’ into different spheres of energy and resource use? While these might seem like micro-sociological questions of minor significance to questions of macro-scale system transformations, cumulatively they underscore how little we know of the actual impacts experienced by those endeavouring to take up some of the consumer-user practices outlined in Figure 1. EXCERPT #G9LP9W p. 13 In this sense, a call for critical research into CE user-consumer roles goes beyond restating arguments about the ‘responsibilization’ of the consumer (e.g. Soneryd and Uggla 2015), where the (environmental) buck is passed down from businesses and governments to us all, as the (alleged) sovereign consumers to whom markets are merely responding. Rather, the arguments here bring us more towards Tukker’s comment (2015, p. 88) that a key goal for ‘consumers’ is ‘to have control over things, artifacts, and life itself’. Whereas one might interpret that comment a number of ways, I argue it points towards how life histories and chances are inter-woven with material cultures and practices. Proponents of the CE focus on the best ways to exchange one set of consumption practices with others, framed as cheaper and more efficient deals. But social research points towards the CE as being nothing short of a recalibration of our socio-material lives, if the ambitions of the agenda are in any way to be matched by the systemic transformations it will indeed require. And as such, further insight into how all of our roles are being framed and played out; what is illuminated and what is hidden by such framings; and who gains what, how, and to what ends is a central but, to date, undervalued part of the CE – and indeed environmental politics – research. DOCUMENT #UMYA27 The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy SECTION #Z2MRHK Concluding comments: setting the agenda for an environmental politics of CE EXCERPT #4RBR4P p. 13 I have aimed to be deliberately provocative as befits this point in this journal’s history and the special issue this is a part of. The goal has been to highlight how the CE has emerged as a key, multi-scale agenda that stretches far beyond environmental sustainability. Instead, it is positioned as a pathway to bring about nothing short of regional (and by implications, global) prosperity and competitiveness into the 21 st century. And from a critical environmental politics research perspective, I have aimed to make the case that prevailing EXCERPT #8MYPM3 p. 14 EXCERPT #DMHBBT p. 14 governance framings of the CE are both business as usual and not. On the one hand, well-trodden critiques of 'weak sustainability' agendas can be applied to how, for example, the European Commission and EMF conceive of the CE. That is, as able to achieve systemic transformation through better regulation and more efficient business models, leaving questions of who wins and loses pretty much out of the mix. But, on the other hand – and the main thrust here – critiquing the CE as sustainability rebranded, and leaving our analysis there, underplays what is potentially at stake and what we can, as researchers, contribute to understanding such stakes. Nowhere is this point more apparent than in how the CE user-consumer is being framed and (attempted to be) brought about. While, for decades, we have all been exhorted to 'buy green' (or not) and recycle a bit more, with mixed results, there is a case to be made that being a CE user-consumer requires nothing short of the reconstitution of 'life itself' (Tukker 2015): a point rarely seen in business-friendly renderings of the CE where the user-consumer is someone who needs to be told about, and then priced-into, more circular business models. EXCERPT #96CFUL p. 14 All of the above invariably invites more questions than it answers. For example, who is influencing and deciding upon CE agendas and framings of, say, European and Chinese versions of this framework? What roles are new organisations like EMF playing in this agenda, and to what effect? What would an alternate framing, of a 'circular citizen' (perhaps), look like: and how could (if at all) this concept be brought into prevailing framings of the CE? What social and economic transformations, realised how, would follow on from this reframing? How could we keep track of the winners and losers in this version of the CE: and indeed, what constitutes a winner and loser, as such? And how does any notion of a 'circular citizen' articulate with other forms of environmental practice like activism and protest? No doubt more questions remain. The key point is that environmental politics research is indispensable to addressing such questions and, as such, seeing this topic taken up more in the pages of this journal would make a valuable contribution to a much-needed critical politics of the Circular Economy: a discourse and agenda that looks set to remain central to key governance goals and interventions for many years to come. ### 19. Tool result: read DOCUMENT #4AE86F From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices: socio-spatial transformations in the Circular City SECTION #LKDJQD ABSTRACT EXCERPT #6UWRFU p. 1 Debates about the ‘Circular City’ have underscored the need to rethink consumption practices within urban spaces. This intervention explores these arguments, and suggests that some research and interventions to date have under-played the relationship between unsustainable consumption practices and urban spatial forms, drawing on work into mobile phones and the ‘circular consumer’. ### 20. Assistant Here's a clean orientation to Hobson and the wider circular-economy critique she's done — written so you can drop a version of it into your introduction or your theoretical framework with light editing. ## A two-paragraph primer The **Circular Economy** (CE) emerged as a policy framework in the early 2010s that promises to replace the linear "take–make–dispose" model with closed loops in which products, components, and materials are kept in use for as long as possible (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2013; #SF6H7V). It synthesizes older ideas from industrial ecology, cradle-to-cradle design, and product-service systems, and has been picked up rapidly by the EU, China, and major economic forums as a strategy that promises environmental sustainability *and* continued growth. The dominant CE imagination is technical and managerial: better design, better business models, better recycling infrastructure, with consumers placed at the receiving end as nodes through which materials flow back into the loop (#BKS58J). Its measure of success is throughput — tonnes diverted, materials recovered, loops "closed." **Kersty Hobson** is the most consistent and useful critic of this framing for your purposes, and her work runs across three papers in your corpus, each doing something distinct: ## The three Hobson papers, briefly **"Closing the loop or squaring the circle?" (2016, #8ZKAT7)** is the early intervention. Hobson's worry here is that CE, as it was being institutionalised, looked a lot like "weak ecological modernisation" rebooted (#RSXV9L, #ENHUAJ): a technical fix that leaves consumption norms, governance, and political-economic arrangements untouched. Her positive move is to argue that human geography — and by extension other socio-cultural disciplines — needs to claim CE as its territory, because the *socio-material* and *everyday* dimensions of circulation are exactly what the dominant framing elides. She introduces the idea of "generative spaces" of CE: sites where citizens are not just acceptors of redesigned products but designers, repairers, prosumers, "everyday activists" (#NB8CR8, #4G9UV6). This is the paper that opens the door for ethnography of places like Brīvbode to count as CE research at all. **"The limits of the loops" (2021, #UMYA27)** is the sharper, more political follow-up. The argument: CE is not just business-as-usual rebranded, but something more troubling — a framework that *looks* transformative while quietly accelerating the resource use it claims to address (#A5NZ9C, #CXWVEV). Her central diagnostic is the figure of the "user-consumer" in the EMF butterfly diagram (#BKS58J, #47382C): central in image, passive in script. The user-consumer's role is reduced to "acceptance" or "buy-in" of new circular business models — choosing the leased phone, remembering to recycle. Hobson points out, citing Welch et al., that this misses what CE actually demands: not consumer choice but a recalibration of "life itself" (Tukker), the reorganisation of time, skill, relationships, and material practices. This is also where she names **consumption work** (Wheeler and Glucksmann) as the missing concept (#DUTG22) — directly relevant to your Chapter 5. **"From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices" (2020, #4AE86F)** is a short intervention extending the critique spatially: CE policies (and the "circular city" agenda specifically) imagine an idealised circular consumer abstracted from the urban environments and infrastructures that actually shape what people can do (#6UWRFU). It's a reminder that circularity is not a property of individuals but of socio-spatial arrangements — useful background for arguing that Brīvbode's specific urban embeddedness (a physical venue, walkable, with rental space, in Āgenskalns near Gaiziņš) is constitutive of the practice, not incidental. ## What's useful for your thesis Three takeaways you can lean on: 1. **The "metric problem."** Hobson is the citation that authorises your throughput-vs-friction critique. CE measures circularity by efficiency of material flow; she argues this is impoverished and possibly counterproductive. Pair her with Shove & Rinkinen #RP8YNG ("if the primary ambition is efficient flow… reduction of resource use is secondary") and you have the canonical critique in two sentences. 2. **The user-consumer as passive node.** Her framing of the EMF butterfly diagram (#BKS58J) is the diagnostic image you can invoke whenever you want to mark the gap between policy imagination and ethnographic reality. Brīvbode participants are not nodes; they are the labour, the moral economy, and the friction that make circulation happen. 3. **Consumption work as the bridge.** Hobson explicitly points to Wheeler and Glucksmann's "consumption work" as the kind of concept CE research needs (#DUTG22). Your Chapter 5 is essentially what she's calling for. You can cite #DUTG22 as the moment a leading CE critic flags exactly the framework you build the chapter on — that's a strong move. The shortest version, for an intro paragraph: *Circular Economy emerged in the 2010s as the dominant policy framework for sustainable resource use, promising to replace linearity with closed loops of repair, reuse, and recycling. Its imagination is technical and managerial, its metric is throughput, and its consumer is a passive node accepting redesigned goods. Critics — Hobson (2016, 2020, 2021) most prominently — have argued that this framing systematically underplays what circulation actually demands of everyday life: time, skill, relational labour, and the recalibration of socio-material practice. This thesis takes that critique into ethnographic territory.* ### 21. User ok thanks - now how does the thesis currently argue re CE? and like... ch4 is about what value people find in brivbode, in part, right? and it has an argument through line that hovers around a notion of plurality and moral economy etc...? ### 22. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "ZF9EYF", "M9WQLY", "L759F3" ], "expand": true } ``` ### 23. Tool result: read THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #ZF9EYF Introduction PARAGRAPH #J4M2WK We live in a context of overproduction where managing the flow of things in households becomes both a practical and a moral problem. In the case of textiles in particular, large quantities of clothing circulate through markets at increasing speed while average use time continues to decline. Circular economy policies increasingly position reuse and extended product lifetimes as solutions, yet the success of it depends on everyday practices that are labour-intensive and socially uneven (Hobson et al. 2021). PARAGRAPH #ADQD9U This thesis is an ethnographic study of freecycling – the circulation of things within a non-monetary context – in Brīvbode, a volunteer-run swapshop1 in Riga. It examines how freecycling is organised and sustained as a social practice and what work it requires from its participants. Freecycling is viewed as a socially embedded, materially organized practice, and in this thesis it is situated within broader debates on sustainable consumption practices. PARAGRAPH #XKELL5 Consumption and divestment practices are changing, shaped by new infrastructure and policy developments – Latvia introduced mandatory textile collection in 2023, and new secondhand platforms are expanding the routes available for sequential flows of household goods. A study of Brīvbode contributes to understanding this changing practice landscape by offering an empirical account of one specific site where divestment, acquisition, and non-monetary exchange come together, at a particular moment in the development of circular consumption practices in Latvia. Freecycling, as viewed in this thesis, is a practice that contains elements that are widely shared and common but are placed and enacted in a new context of non-monetary exchange in a non-domestic site. Thus I argue that Brīvbode offers to practitioners somehow familiar, yet new ways of relating to objects and people (Holmes, 2018). PARAGRAPH #SNLDAM The thesis draws on two main analytical frameworks. The first is practice theory, following Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012) and other authors studying sustainable consumption practices. Freecycling is analysed as a practice-entity constituted by materials, meanings, and competencies. The second theoretical framework is Wheeler and Glucksmann's (2015) concept of consumption work that brings attention to the range of tasks required of consumers before or after the moment of exchange, on which consumption itself depends, especially within contexts of circular economy initiatives. It is extended here to include the volunteer labour of the freeshop and the divestment networks through which household surplus reaches it. Together these frameworks allow the thesis to attend to both what freecycling is as a recognisable social form, and what it costs in labour, skill, and care to sustain it. PARAGRAPH #BTDD45 Hobson et al. (2021) argue that research into circular economy consumption work must “move beyond the domestic sphere and space of the household” to examine consumption-based practices in other spaces, including Repair Cafés and community-based circular economy models, whether or not these are explicitly labelled as such. Brīvbode is such a space: a semi-public site where the ordinarily private labour of divestment and acquisition becomes visible and socially acknowledged, and where volunteer labour — sorting, curating, maintaining quality standards, and managing social dynamics — sustains the infrastructure through which things continue to circulate. PARAGRAPH #UBJLE3 The study is based on participant observation in Brīvbode combined with fifteen semi-structured interviews with visitors, regular participants, and volunteers. My own participation as a volunteer shaped the fieldwork and is reflected in the analysis. PARAGRAPH #PYHGNL The thesis is guided by two research questions: PARAGRAPH #NSNSQ3 How is freecycling organised and sustained in Brīvbode as a non-monetary, non-domestic site – what materials, meanings and competencies constitute it and how do they interact? PARAGRAPH #3TTCZA What work does freecycling in Brīvbode require from participants, and how is that work currently distributed? PARAGRAPH #577FMZ The bulk of things circulating in Brīvbode are textiles – mostly clothing, but also home textile. Textiles have been identified as a priority sector in the European Union’s Circular Economy Action Plan (European Commission, 2020), and EU Textile Strategy (2022-ongoing) states that textiles should be durable, repairable, reusable, and reuse should be part of the desired system outcome. [..] [Statistics on Baltics as the destination in the circular economies of other countries…] SECTION #LAR465 Latvian context and research PARAGRAPH #Y38N9B Historically, second-hand in Latvia has been more commonly associated with acquisition rather than divestment. The colloquial term humpalas – derived from humānā palīdzība (humanitarian aid) – reflects the history of donated clothing arriving from abroad, particularly in the post-socialist period. In this context, second-hand goods were framed as assistance in times when access to consumer goods was limited rather than as part of a reciprocal or circular system, and organised opportunities for individuals to pass on their own items in organised ways were typically confined to informal exchanges or charitable donations. PARAGRAPH #SRVVZ4 A shift began with the emergence of more structured divestment infrastructures, such as the opening of the first Otrā Elpa charity shop in Riga in 2009. These initiatives introduced new channels for divestment, and gradually moved second-hand consumption from a one-directional flow of aid toward a more participatory system of reuse. Data indicates that second-hand acquisition remains a significant part of the textile market in the Baltic States: a 2023 representative survey found that 55% of Latvian participants currently buy second-hand clothing (Akule et al., 2023), and in 2018 second-hand accounted for around 40% of textile consumption in Latvia (Watson et al., 2020). PARAGRAPH #BHE8T3 In recent years the landscape has diversified further, with online groups, neighbourhood swapping events, book and plant exchange shelves, digital resale platforms, and informal stall-based initiatives all forming part of a dispersed network of everyday circulation practices. PARAGRAPH #4FP5K7 Various exchange, divestment and second hand alternatives are currently available and are routinely used by people in Riga – online groups, charity shops and textile collection containers – but what sets Brīvbode apart is the operation on a physical site, the exchange without regulated monetary transaction, and a sustained volunteer infrastructure that makes repeated visits possible and socially meaningful. It is open every week, year-round, and this regularity is central to what it offers – a route for acquisition and divestment, but also a predictable rhythm that participants can build into their everyday routines. PARAGRAPH #7LMSFU In recent years, a range of initiatives for circulation and reuse of everyday goods have emerged in Latvia, indicating a growing and also increasingly institutionalised diversification of non-market and low-cost access practices. [Different modes – institutional, informal initiatives – that are also based on different types of work?] [Andele Mandele and Vinted – growing second hand sector.] Access to infrastructure not distributed evenly (Akule et al. 2013). PARAGRAPH #2CU6EC Similar practices have long operated in digital environments, with specified online groups facilitating the redistribution of goods between users, e.g. “Atbrīvojies no lietām” (“Rid yourself of things”) – the names of these groups also indicate them as stemming from divestment, initiated by the giver as an opportunity to gain freedom from the burden of unwanted ownership. PARAGRAPH #YNKV5D In recent years more informal small scale infrastructures have become visible in urban space, such as book and plant exchange shelves located in libraries, clinics, educational institutions and cafés. Organised events, such as neighbourhood-based swapping, contribute to this landscape. Also smaller scale informal initiatives exist, for example, a participant told me about a trader who has set up a swapshop-like space in an unused stall in Matīsa market in Riga, maintaining it alongside her own activities. According to my interlocutors, such spaces attract regular users and form part of a dispersed network of everyday circulation practices. PARAGRAPH #NQNRFE At the same time, practices of leaving items in semi-public spaces – such as stairwells or next to waste containers – continue to operate as low-threshold forms of divestment, blurring the boundary between disposal and reuse. Second-hand retail chains remain a strong presence and provide access to low-cost goods that at times (e.g. special clearance days) approach free consumption. Other hybrid models combine elements of exchange and redistribution, such as the waste management company’s CleanR exchange point “Nomales” or the national reuse platform platform lietovelreiz.lv. PARAGRAPH #JNSARN [Although, for participants this aspect is not always significant, Brīvbode sustains domestic reuse, without sending things to other countries (although leftovers are absorbed by the textile collection system.] PARAGRAPH #C9N497 The first “library of things” in Riga was opened at the library of Goethe Institute in 2021, and this spring another two were established – in Sarkandaugava neighbourhood (currently announced as working until February 2027 within a project framework) and another in the nearby coastal town of Carnikava (running alongside a swapshop, opened by in collaboration with a waste management company). PARAGRAPH #TT4B8P Data indicates that second-hand acquisition remains a significant part of the textile market in the Baltic States, particularly in Latvia, where it accounts for a substantial share of total consumption. In 2018 around 40% of textile consumption in Latvia was second-hand (Watson et. al., 2020). The collection system in Latvia has undergone rapid expansion and formalization through new legislation. Latvia introduced mandatory separate textile collection in 2023, reflecting the broader EU regulatory direction established by the Circular Economy Action Plan and the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles. PARAGRAPH #T5G2TS A 2023 representative survey found that 55% of Latvian participants currently buy second-hand clothing, a rate similar to Estonia (61%) and Finland (56%). PARAGRAPH #HZ8D53 [Brīvbode focusing on domestic flows] PARAGRAPH #N6UNLT References to other research in Latvia. Sufficiency lifestyles research. Circular textiles in Latvia… Andris Saulītis on barter shop. SECTION #MUKRGA A note on terms PARAGRAPH #5P28WG Choosing the right terms to refer to Brīvbode is not straightforward. For one, no word currently exists in Latvian to describe the practice, and the available English terms each carry connotations that fit only partially. PARAGRAPH #JLS4NG The name “Brīvbode” is a more or less localization of the term “freeshop”: “brīv-” means “free”, while “bode” alludes to the cosy scale and affectionate oldschool character of a small shop, associated with a persona of bodnieks or bodniece – the person who attends to it and mediates the relations with visitors. Some regulars of Brīvbode use the diminutive “bodīte”, a form of endearment very common in Latvian. PARAGRAPH #8S9QR2 However, the organizers have a complicated relationship with the term “freeshop”. As Brīvbode manager Rasa shared in an interview, the name already existed when she joined the initiative and they were trying to come up with alternative names in the beginning but did not manage to replace it. Their preferred term is “swapshop” which I also use in this thesis. “Swapshop”, as I discuss in Chapter 4, positions Brīvbode as a site of exchange rather than charity. However, as a descriptive term for “what actually happens there” I consider swapping not suitable enough, as it overstates the symmetry and implies an exchange with one to one logic, which is not the case in Brīvbode. In this thesis, I use the term “freecycling” to refer to the what is done in Brīvbode, as it emphasises the circularity aspect of the practice. While freecycling has its own specific origin, associated with the Freecycle Network, an online platform for giving things away locally, I use the term nonetheless because it captures the non-monetary circulation of goods without implying directness of swapping or the one-directionality of donation. SECTION #FVXBEK The structure of the thesis PARAGRAPH #ALLPXH The thesis is organised as follows: Chapter Two reviews the relevant literature, situating the study within debates on practice theory and sustainable consumption and consumption work. Chapter Three describes the methodology, including the fieldwork context, interview approach, and analytical framework. Chapter Four, the first empirical chapter, examines Brīvbode as a site of freecycling practice: the materials flowing through it, the plural meanings and competencies that sustain giving and taking, and the non-monetary context that shapes the flows. Chapter Five turns more closely to the labour that sustains the flows described in Chapter Four, applying Wheeler and Glucksmann's consumption work framework to analyse the work performed by volunteers, participants, and the extended divestment networks that connect Brīvbode to surrounding households. The thesis concludes by drawing together the empirical findings and reflecting on what Brīvbode reveals about the conditions under which circular consumption practices can be sustained in everyday life. THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #M9WQLY CONCLUSION PARAGRAPH #JE7FK2 This thesis is an ethnographic study of a swapshop to investigate how these spaces foster alternative consumption practices that possibly sustain alternative logics of value and ownership. This thesis is a contribution to the studies of circular consumption using ethnographic methods with practice theory approach. PARAGRAPH #U2PZ9C Brīvbode operates within the conditions of overproduction, where the circulation of goods is shaped as much by excess as by need. While it enables reuse and access, it also absorbs the material overflow generated elsewhere. The labor of managing excess – the sorting, the deciding, the transporting, the emotional work of letting go – falls unevenly on people, is often invisible, and that becomes especially evident in circular economy contexts where more participation is needed. While some consumption work is alleviated in Brīvbode, it is replaced by other types. PARAGRAPH #FE5BCM Participation in Brīvbode is a form of consumption work, and understanding it as such reveals both what the swapshop enables and what it demands. Consumption work in the context of the swapshop: the effort of finding, sorting, or repurposing items, as well as the broader social practices around bringing and taking items from Brīvbode – decluttering, home organising, dealing with the needs of family members. PARAGRAPH #GUXEZX While alternative, they simultaneously overlap with some of the meanings present in capitalist consumption –... Brīvbode is at once an answer to a household problem and an arena where people work out possibly alternative relations to things. PARAGRAPH #JM9L6Y improvised solution that does not presuppose a lot of resources… except sufficiency lifestyle? PARAGRAPH #NNZ5SG THE TENSION BETWEEN HABIT (practice) AND INTENTION (trying to change?) Is practice unreflexive? Also work can be unreflexive… People are reflecting all the time, but what keeps them in the practice? The stickiness of it… PARAGRAPH #PEFVAC Results, relevance, contribution PARAGRAPH #HMDEDU Brīvbode's moral economy is negotiated, situational practice where the meaning of "right circulation" is worked out in real time rather than determined in advance. PARAGRAPH #9DTFUU Further research might –– move into constitution of need… (Shove and Rinkinen) In line with Warde (2005). Circular consumption is one thing, but does it matter how you get things if it’s still an overflow? THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework PARAGRAPH #QQFE46 This chapter develops a theoretical framework for the thesis, connecting several bodies of work: a practice-theoretical approach to consumption with a focus not only on acquisition and attachment, but also divestment and disposal, and consumption work as a framework for naming the labour that circulation demands and examining how it is distributed. SECTION #Q2WXHP Theories of Practice PARAGRAPH #H7MB3H The central theoretical grounding for this thesis is practice theory – or rather theories of practice – a heterogeneous cluster of approaches in humanities and social sciences in which practice serves as the primary unit of analysis for understanding human life and sociality. Shifting away from individual motivations and attitudes, behaviours and choices (ABC) based models for change, for example, practice theory rather examines how those doings are organized socially. It enables looking at the interconnectedness of the social and material realms with an emphasis on the role of objects, infrastructures and technology in practice enactment and maintenance. Evolved in a lineage from Bourdieu (1977) and Giddens (1984) in social sciences, in the past decades theories of practice have been influential and applied across various domains in social sciences and humanities, constituting what has been called a practice turn (reference). PARAGRAPH #A2ACVP While varied definitions of social practice exist, Warde suggests a minimal definition: “An organized, and recognizable, socially shared bundle of activities that involves the integration of a complex array of components: material, embodied, ideational and affective. Practices are sets of ‘doings and sayings’; they involve both practical activity and its representations" (Warde, 2005: 134). PARAGRAPH #B4MLVB Different frameworks have been articulated to account for the elements constituting practices. PARAGRAPH #ZA3SED Practice-as-performance - “doings and sayings”, embodied actions. PARAGRAPH #G5LFQA Practice-as-entity - materials, meanings, and competencies. PARAGRAPH #ZALK38 Practice-as-bundle (practice-as-system) PARAGRAPH #JCD8P5 Practices as entities can be distinguished from practices as performances: the specific, recurrent enactments through which practices are reproduced or transformed. Transformation and change comes through recombination of the elements of practice (Shove et al. 2012) – a complex process that is constantly evolving and difficult to predict. PARAGRAPH #KSLB7G A particularly influential contribution, especially in anthropological approaches to practice, is the work of Elisabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar and Matt Watson (2012) in which the authors offer a deliberately compact three-component framework for analysing practices: practice as entity. Shove and colleagues define a practice element frame consisting of meanings, materials, and competencies. “Meanings” refer to the ideas, aspirations, shared understandings and related values that give practice its purpose and make it intelligible for practitioners and guide how practices are performed. “Materials” refer to objects involved and used in practice, necessary technologies and infrastructure through which practices are enacted. It also refers to bodies and physicality. “Competencies” are the skills (across cognitive and physical realms) and practical knowledge necessary for participation in a practice, including understanding how to use objects, follow rules, and navigate social norms. PARAGRAPH #8MU8D5 The authors acknowledge that the model sacrifices some nuance to analytical clarity, yet argue that it is analytically productive, especially for studying how practices change and develop when their elements are reconfigured. It allows looking at practices as entities with their own histories and trajectories – recruiting or losing practitioners, appearing and disappearing. PARAGRAPH #RG72B3 This threefold structure of elements of practice has been used widely across disciplines as it offers a clear conceptual approach for empirical research. PARAGRAPH #QPWYY6 Delineating a practice and setting it apart from adjacent practices can be one of the challenges in practice theory, as there are no fixed procedural rules for determining exactly where one practice ends and another begins. Nicolini (2017: 26-27) notes that, while for analytical purposes, practices can be conceived and examined individually, empirically they are always encountered in arrays and multiplicities. Practices “hang together” in bundles and complexes (Shove et al. 2012), distinguished by the density and “stickiness” of their patterns. Practice bundles refer to the more loose-knit relations between practices, often gathered around the same site or time – practices that are related and shape each other but not strongly. Complexes refer to more integrated combinations that can also constitute new practice entities if the relations become significantly denser. In this thesis, I analyse freecycling in Brīvbode as a practice entity and as performed, while recognising the emerging state of freecycling as a practice in Latvia. SECTION #WULWDF Theories of Practice to Study Alternative Practices? PARAGRAPH #N4RD83 Practice theory, as developed by Elisabeth Shove, has been applied a lot to analyze stable, dominant, and largely unreflected practices that are taken for granted in everyday domestic routines (Shove 2003), particularly the inconspicuous consumption of energy and resources in affluent Western societies that drives resource use beyond planetary boundaries. Shove has even argued that “investigations into the beliefs and actions of self-confessed environmentalists represent something of a distraction. What counts is the big, and in some cases, global swing of ordinary, routinized and taken-for-granted practice…” (Shove, 2003: 9). PARAGRAPH #3RASYG Yet as Welch and Warde (2015) note, this strategic move away from environmentalists’ motivations has come at a cost, leading to a neglect of the cultural dimensions of sustainable consumption (Spaargaren 2013). Other authors have argued for a greater attention to non-hegemonic practices that serve as alternatives to mass consumption (e.g. Speck and Hasselkuss 2015). Practice theories are useful here too, as a tool for understanding how more sustainable alternatives might become normalised or integrated into existing consumption routines. PARAGRAPH #QTER48 Freecycling at Brīvbode sits at an interesting angle in this argument – it has both conventional and unconventional elements. It is not a widely shared, fully stabilised routine practice in Shove’s sense. Yet the practices it draws on – household divestment, secondhand acquisition, sequential use of goods – are not unusual in Riga or Latvia; what is less common is their organisation within a permanent, non-monetary exchange site. It is also a practice that is becoming more prevalent, as similar spaces and infrastructures appear more in Latvia. PARAGRAPH #6SSXMN Recent work in second-generation practice theory has begun to reintroduce questions of ethics, culture, and reflexivity into analyses of consumption (Askholm, 2024; Welch et al., 2020). Earlier approaches tended to focus on routine and inconspicuous practices, often sidelining the role of evaluative judgement and cultural meaning. This study engages with this emerging direction by examining how practices of freecycling involve not only routine forms of circulation, but also moments of reflection, valuation, and ethical consideration. SECTION #HQ4PZX Consumption practices PARAGRAPH #X4S4S5 Practice theories have been widely applied in studies of sustainability and consumption. Whereas previously widespread theories of consumption in the 1980s and 1990s often treated it as a matter of individual choice and identity-making (reference to illustrate these approaches), theories of practice enabled attending to consumption patterns that emerge from the practices in which people are engaged, rather than mainly from their preferences or intentions. This decentring of the individual marked a significant departure from both the rational-choice models of consumer behaviour research and the identity-focused approaches of consumer culture theory (reference). PARAGRAPH #C6LN2K Warde’s (2005) paper “Consumption and theories of practice” is widely regarded as the first programmatic application of practice theory to consumption studies (Welch & Warde 2015). Its central contribution was to reconceptualise consumption as "not itself a practice but rather a moment in almost every practice" (Warde 2005: 137). Warde conceptualizes consumption not as a separate domain of social life organised around the acquisition of goods, but as an integral component of social practices through which people organize their daily lives. People consume in the course of doing other things: e.g. maintaining a household, raising children, managing seasonal change, responding to gifts received, keeping warm, eating, moving around. As Warde (2005: 146) puts it, from this perspective “the concept of ‘the consumer’ ... evaporates. Instead the key focal points become the organization of the practice and the moments of consumption enjoined.” PARAGRAPH #437SCH There is also a particular affinity between consumption and sustainability studies. Welch and Warde (2015) identify three reasons for it. Firstly, much of the environmental impact of consumption stems from routine practices – such as showering or doing laundry – that involve significant, yet often unnoticed, use of energy and resources (Shove, 2003). For such inconspicuous, resource intensive practices analysis of consumption as symbolic display and presentation of self that was more prevalent in consumption studies before is less relevant than attention to the material and social arrangements that sustain them. Secondly, because goods and services are primarily used for the accomplishment of social practices rather than for consumption per se. Thirdly, practice theory can provide a way out of discussions of the “value–action” gap – the persistent discrepancy between reportedly pro-environmental values which by contrast are not reflected in a person’s behaviour – by redirecting focus on the ways resource intensive practices capture and retain their practitioners. PARAGRAPH #N7QTYJ This thesis aligns with practice theoretical perspectives on sustainable consumption that attend to the full cycle of goods through domestic life – considering not only the goods and materials people acquire, but also divestment and disposal (Ehgartner and Holmes, 2022). For example, Evans (2020) responds to this by proposing an expanded definition of consumption as a process involving multiple moments beyond acquisition. Following Warde (2005), he identifies appropriation – the use, personalisation, and incorporation of goods into everyday life – and appreciation – the personal and symbolic frameworks through which goods are evaluated and enjoyed. To these he adds three further moments: devaluation, the loss of economic or symbolic value; divestment, the loss of personal meaning and the unravelling of attachments; and disposal, the physical act of getting rid of things (Evans 2020: 345). Taken together, these six moments constitute consumption as a full cycle rather than a single event. Evans notes that a case could be made for simplifying this further, though – replacing the three acquisition related moments with a single concept of attachment, and the three divestment related moments with detachment ¬ a formulation that captures the emotional and relational dimensions of both acquiring and letting go (Evans, 2020: 347). PARAGRAPH #VLCJ6H This expanded definition of consumption to include detachment (divestment, disposal) is at the basis of this thesis. Brīvbode can thus be understood as a consumption site in both directions: people come to divest goods that have reached the end of their household life, and they come to acquire goods that may be entering a new phase of their biography. The swapshop is a node in the ordinary circulation of goods through domestic life, distinguished by its non-monetary character and physical permanence. SECTION #23NMLX Consumption Work PARAGRAPH #WCS3TZ If practice theory explains how the circulation of goods is socially organised, consumption work names what that circulation costs. Practice theory’s focus on competencies – the skills and know-how through which practices are enacted – tends to emphasize how things are done rather than the effort and resources required to do them. Labor-centric views (e.g. through the concepts of consumption work or care work) instead highlight the laborious aspects of these practices, including the work of acquiring, managing, and disposing of goods and can address this gap directly. This is important in order to examine how circular consumption creates responsibilities and in what ways new forms of consumption work are distributed through populations. PARAGRAPH #ZBGB9J Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015) contend that secondhand markets involve consumption work – sorting, cleaning, repairing. “Consumption work”, for them, refers to the range of tasks required of consumers, before or after they consume, on which consumption itself is predicated – the work that must be done before or after the moment of exchange for consumption to be possible at all. Their framework encompasses technical dimensions – the allocation of tasks and skills to different people; modal dimensions – interdependencies of work across different social and economic arrangements; and processual dimensions – the connections of labour across the full span of a consumption process (Wheeler & Gluckmann, 2015: 35-36). In circular economy contexts, Hobson et al. (2021) argue, this work intensifies: responsible divestment requires more effort than simply throwing things away, and the additional demands fall disproportionately on those who are already doing most of the household management work. PARAGRAPH #Q26XE6 In a recent study of household reuse practices, Beswick-Parsons, Evans and Jackson (2025) identify specific forms of consumption work involved in everyday circular consumption – decanting, stock management, recirculating – and argue that reuse practices are more prevalent and more varied than existing policy commentary assumes. Their analysis provides empirical precedent for examining consumption work and for attending to the range of tasks that participation in reuse practices requires. They conclude that future transitions to reuse might depend less on establishing new practices, driven by narratives of green consumerism, but rather greater attention should be paid to wider changes, including the transformation of supply chains to align with and facilitate the range of ‘reuse work’ currently observed within everyday domestic spaces. PARAGRAPH #92SD6X [“Recent research at the intersection of practice theory and circular consumption has begun to foreground the labour involved in sustaining material circulation. Drawing on a practice-theoretical approach, Réka Tölg shows that circular consumption – particularly in the context of clothing – relies on the ongoing enactment of care in everyday practices. This involves not only acquiring and using garments, but also maintaining, repairing, and eventually parting with them in ways that enable their continued circulation. Such practices require the development of skills, awareness, and a sense of responsibility, and are often shaped by socio-material arrangements in both household and retail contexts. At the same time, Tölg highlights that these practices are not straightforward to accomplish, but are characterised by tensions, dilemmas, and constraints within systems still largely organised around linear consumption. In this sense, circular consumption can be understood not as a simple behavioural shift, but as an ongoing accomplishment that entails effort, coordination, and engagement – what has been conceptualised elsewhere as “consumption work” (Hobson et al., 2021).”] PARAGRAPH #2RA8WL The thesis also attends to the gendered distribution of this work. Ethnographic research has demonstrated that consumption is often organised around care for others, and that women often function as moral agents in household consumption, regulating what goes in and out of households (Miller, 1998, Reno, 2016). Shopping and consumption practices can be seen as acts of care, where people choose items with loved ones in mind, reflecting their role in family and social networks. PARAGRAPH #HWS5KX [Second hand source that I should check] (Lindsay et al. 2024) Lindsay et al. (2024) and Organo et al. (2013) find that women consistently spend more time on sustainable household practices than men, and that “sustainability labour” tends to be more absorbed into existing patterns of gendered domestic work rather than redistributed.] PARAGRAPH #AXVP4C Consumption work and practice theory in this thesis are complementary frameworks. Following the argument developed above in section 2.2., consumption work describes what practices demand from their carriers rather than what individuals choose to do. The labour is in the practice; the questions of what kind of labour and who bears it are questions about the social organisation of practice and whose bodies and time it recruits. SECTION #ULSUAX Conclusion PARAGRAPH #7RYKMT This thesis brings together practice-theoretical perspectives on sustainable consumption and consumption work for a study of non-domestic site of goods circulation within a context of non-monetary exchange. Brīvbode is a site where the ordinarily private and dispersed practices of domestic material life become visible. The continued existence of the swapshop – sustained through regular volunteer labour, participant labour, and a relatively stable social and material infrastructure – can be read as evidence of the demand that household goods circulation generates: a demand for routes of divestment that, while taking some degree of effort, are socially acknowledged. PARAGRAPH #2G2WSX PIEVIENOT PARAGRAPH #MHZQUS “Pinning down the actual practice and its scale, identifying overlaps with other practices or deciding which actions belong to which practice registers as a tricky task, further complicated by the fact that practices change over time.” (Sedlačko, 2017: 53) PARAGRAPH #CE4SN6 consumption as a middle class sustainability “issue”? PARAGRAPH #A3Q9XS A central conclusion is that textile disposal has become normalized. – “Sustainability transitions in textiles therefore require systemic reconfiguration of what is considered ‘normal’ in household practices.” PARAGRAPH #LZ9SHB “this dissertation conceptualizes disposal as a material, cultural, and social practice central to consumption, rather than a peripheral or undesirable act. PARAGRAPH #D3N7FX Disposal is treated not simply as the act of discarding but as a meaningful practice that enables and intersects with the reproduction of broader everyday activities. PARAGRAPH #ER4VSA In sociology, the study of consumption has evolved through three major phases: an early focus on economistic models prior to the 1980s; the ‘cultural turn’ of the early 1980s, which emphasized meaning-making, identity, and symbolic value; and, more recently, a ‘practice turn’ that reorients attention toward the routines, materialities, and shared norms of everyday life (Warde, 2014, 2015). PARAGRAPH #YK565D in clothing consumption research consumption of clothing is viewed as a habitual and socially embedded activity rather than a constant, deliberate process of choice and identity construction (Chamberlin & Callmer, 2021; Miller & Woodward, 2012; van der Laan & Velthuis, 2016). PARAGRAPH #FT8AED “In their classical taxonomy for describing consumer disposition behavior, Jacoby et al. (1977) illustrated that disposal may involve keeping, donating, selling, recycling, or throwing away, and even within each category, multiple practices exist. Disposal is thus not inherently destructive or wasteful and cannot be reduced to simply ‘throwing something away’, but is an active social practice embedded in ethical, cultural, and material contexts (Hetherington, 2004). This perspective recognizes disposal as an active, meaning-making practice. As Gregson et al. (2007b) argue, divestment is not simply a negative or absent moment in consumer life, but a practice that enables other practices. To sustain certain routines and identities, other objects must be removed. In this sense, disposal is not the final step in a linear production-consumption-waste chain but a recursive moment that helps reorder consumption itself (Gregson et al., 2007a; Hetherington, 2004). Following Douglas (2002), disposal can be seen as part of the ‘ordering work’ of everyday life, where waste becomes threatening not by its material properties but by its symbolic disruptions of social and domestic order (Gregson et al., 2007a; Heidenstrøm & Hebrok, 2021).” PARAGRAPH #5TXWXW “What we discard reflects who we are but also helps constitute who we become. In this way, waste is both expressive and constitutive of identity (Lucy, 2023).” PARAGRAPH #D3J7AD Maldini et al. (2019), for instance, found that garments are often retained long after they stop being worn, while new items are added without replacing old ones, highlighting the entanglement with disposal and accumulation. Furthermore, as with disposal in general, textile disposal is not merely a matter of getting rid of unwanted things, nor is it a straightforward or linear process. PARAGRAPH #M53GUY “This theoretical approach shifts the analytical focus away from individual behavior to practices allowing textile waste to be understood not as the outcome of isolated decisions but as a meaningful and situated activity embedded in everyday domestic routines.” PARAGRAPH #W5NCU9 “Social phenomena are understood as emerging from, and being embedded within, interconnected networks of practices and the materials that sustain them (Schatzki, 2019).” PARAGRAPH #8Z9KL4 “Dressing is viewed as a dynamic, lifelong everyday practice comprised of three interdependent elements: materials (e.g., clothing, wardrobes, washing machines), meanings (e.g., symbolic notions such as cleanliness or fashion), and competencies (e.g., dressing, laundering, repairing skills) (Maguire & Fahy, 2022; Skjold, 2016).” PARAGRAPH #U87FBB “Textile disposal is conceptualized as a social practice embedded within everyday routines and shaped by normative expectations, identity work, and material needs.” PARAGRAPH #2MV3XY Schatzki’s site ontology PARAGRAPH #FZHH6H “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” PARAGRAPH #MR6SKV ​​For example, textile disposal emerges from the intersection of multiple practices, such as cleaning, organizing, shopping, and caring, even when disposal appears as the main activity. PARAGRAPH #3JUPW7 Shove conceptualizes material entities as one of the core elements of practice, alongside meanings and competencies (Shove et al., 2012; Shove et al., 2007). Acknowledging the different roles that material entities can play, three categories of materiality are proposed: resources (consumables used up in practices), devices (objects directly mobilized during practices), and infrastructure (supporting systems not directly engaged) (Shove, 2016). PARAGRAPH #96FRVP Practice as entity – how does the threefold model PARAGRAPH #AHYBAR Looking at a practice as entity – materials, meanings, competencies. MESOLEVEL. PARAGRAPH #MBE4PM Individual level of practice – practice as performance – doings, sayings, embodied experiences, movements, everyday parts… PRACTICE AS PERFORMANCE. PARAGRAPH #WQZYJP practice as bundle or practice as entity… PARAGRAPH #Z769KE Acknowledge these three levels, focusing on practice as performance and practice as entity. ### 24. Assistant ## How the thesis currently argues about CE The CE argument in the draft is mostly **structural and oblique** rather than frontal. You don't take aim at CE as your central target; you set the thesis up as an *empirical contribution* that shows CE policy what it underestimates. The argument runs roughly: 1. **CE depends on practices it doesn't see.** The intro (#J4M2WK) cites Hobson et al. 2021 to make the claim immediately: CE positions reuse and lifetime extension as solutions, but their success "depends on everyday practices that are labour-intensive and socially uneven." This is the thesis's foundational CE move — and it's quite modest, almost concessive in tone. 2. **Brīvbode is one of the spaces CE policy is being told to look at but doesn't.** #BTDD45 quotes Hobson et al.'s explicit call to move beyond the household into community-based CE sites; you position Brīvbode as exactly that site. 3. **Practice theory + consumption work is the apparatus for seeing what CE doesn't.** Chapter 2 builds the toolkit. The CE critique is implicit in your choice of frameworks: practice theory because CE behavioural models flatten everyday life; consumption work because CE policy doesn't account for the labour circulation requires (#ZBGB9J). 4. **The empirical chapters then deliver the pay-off.** Chapter 4 shows the practice as it actually is. Chapter 5 names the labour. The conclusion (#U2PZ9C) summarises: Brīvbode "operates within the conditions of overproduction… while it enables reuse and access, it also absorbs the material overflow generated elsewhere." 5. **The most pointed CE statement is #RX9JDU**: the absence of price doesn't produce frictionless flow, it produces a different kind of work. That's your strongest direct contribution to the CE debate, and it's currently buried at the end of Chapter 5. So: the thesis's CE argument is *there* but it's distributed and somewhat shy. It doesn't quite name the throughput-vs-friction problem you articulated in the earlier hypothesis. That argument would *fit*, naturally, but you haven't planted it yet. ## Chapter 4's through-line Yes — Chapter 4 is, basically, **a chapter about the plurality of value and the moral economy that holds plurality together.** The argument you've actually written runs like this: - **Set-up (#PL9BXR–#L252MY).** Frame freecycling as practice-entity and performance, attending to "moments of friction and tension where the two pull against each other." The chapter's stated ambition is to show how "the character of Brīvbode as a non-monetary site of exchange is held together less by a single definition than by the moral economy that allows incompatible orientations to coexist." That sentence is your through-line, stated explicitly. - **Section 4.1 (Incoming Flow).** Givers come for diverse reasons — moral relief, decluttering, social rhythm, witnessing circulation, routing things to imagined receivers. The gap between donor self-assessment and what's actually useful is the first source of friction; the swapshop accommodates a wide range of incoming meanings. - **Section 4.2 (Site as Active Flow).** The materiality of the site — physical permanence, retail aesthetic, coexistence with textile collection infrastructure — is what allows the practice's plurality to stabilise. The site itself absorbs disagreement (Rasa vs. the abundance-aesthetic volunteer; the curatorial disputes) without breaking. - **Section 4.3 (Reading the Room).** Norms are situational, not formal — "defined and enacted situationally and relationally, which can be both a strength and a source of friction" (#F9CK8T). Competency is partly the ability to read which norm applies in a given moment. - **Section 4.4 (Not a Charity).** The most explicit moral-economy section: organisers actively maintain "exchange" against the pressures of charity, reselling, and heavy-taking. But — and this is the chapter's interesting move — the moral economy *bends*. Resellers get reframed as "forest sanitarians" (#ERMRTL); the deeper logic of circulation can override the official rule against monetary transactions (#QKY57B). The moral economy is normative *and* pragmatic. - **Section 4.5 (Letting Go).** The non-monetary regime reshapes attachment — people experiment, return things, treat acquisition as low-stakes — but it also can intensify acquisition unless practitioners introduce restraint themselves (Madara's "I switch off the word free"). Sufficiency as self-imposed friction. - **Section 4.6 (Plural Meanings of Acquisition).** This is where the plurality argument is most forcefully made: dignity, originality, craft material, style experimentation, social contact, class-marked stigma, generational normalisation. "The heterogeneity of meanings allows the practice to recruit across a wide and socially diverse public" (#5L3QYB). Crucially, meanings don't need to be coherent or shared. - **Section 4.7 (Quiet or Reflected Sustainability).** The plurality extends to the practice's relationship to sustainability itself. Some practitioners articulate it (Luīze); for others it has receded behind the doing (Viesturs, Rasa). Smith and Jehlička's "quiet sustainability" lets you hold both without forcing a single motivational story. - **Section 4.8 (Conclusion).** "Freecycling in Brīvbode is sustained by a plurality of meanings that are compatible enough to coexist within the same space" (#M3VCHH). The moral economy is what makes coexistence possible. And — this is the residue you leave for Chapter 5 — the tension between alternative-circularity-infrastructure and overflow-channel "does not resolve easily" (#MHM9Q5). ## So the spine of Ch4 is something like: > **Brīvbode is held together not by a unified meaning of what it is, but by a moral economy flexible enough to absorb plural and even incompatible orientations** — donors looking for moral relief, takers looking for dignity or distinction or craft material, organisers maintaining "exchange" against charity-claims while quietly tolerating resellers when the alternative is overflow. The non-monetary regime is what makes this plurality possible (no price means no single legible standard of value), but it is also what generates the situational friction the practice has to keep negotiating. That's a strong and clear argument. The question, if you wanted to sharpen it for the conclusion or for the CE framing: **plurality is not just an empirical finding; it's a structural answer to a CE design problem.** Throughput-oriented CE imagines circulation as a single flow with a single metric. Brīvbode's actual viability depends on its ability to host many flows under one roof — moral, aesthetic, material, social — and the moral economy is the technology that lets it. That reframing would let Chapter 4's plurality finding *talk back* to CE more directly than it currently does. ### 25. User so let's try to see the whole thesis and where it sits..... so CE is a dominant paradigm in governance and so on, EU etc, right? and there is this anthropological ethnographic critique of that, related to how it frames circulation, as a kind of modernist optimization or project.... which leaves out the consumption work.... so practice theory is one approach ? that's shove? ### 26. Assistant Yes — you're tracking it, and let me sharpen the map a bit, because there are actually **several distinct critical traditions** clustered around CE, and your thesis sits at a specific intersection of them. Getting the layering right will help you write the introduction with confidence. ## The dominant paradigm **Circular Economy** as institutional project: EU CE Action Plan (2015, updated 2020), EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles (2022), national strategies (China 2008, Wales, Spain, Canada), industry advocacy via the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Intellectual roots in **industrial ecology, cradle-to-cradle design, and product-service systems** — engineering and design traditions reaching back to the 1960s–70s. Its imagination is technical-managerial: redesign the product, redesign the business model, recover the materials, close the loop. Hobson (#CXWVEV) calls this an "eco-modernist technocratic" project; McLaren and Niskanen say the same. This is, as you put it, **modernist optimization** — the idea that the resource problem can be solved by smarter engineering of flows without disturbing the political economy or the cultural organisation of consumption. Hobson and others link it to "weak ecological modernisation" (#ENHUAJ): the longstanding move that promises sustainability through efficiency gains while keeping growth-based capitalism intact. ## The critical traditions around it There are **three overlapping but distinguishable** critical bodies of work in your corpus, each doing slightly different work: ### 1. The practice-theoretical critique (Shove and her circle) This is the lineage you've built your framework on. **Elizabeth Shove** (Lancaster), with Pantzar, Watson, Spurling, Trentmann, Rinkinen, etc. The argument: behaviour-change models (Attitude–Behaviour–Choice) and consumer-acceptance models miss how consumption is actually organised — through bundles of materials, meanings, and competencies that are reproduced socially, often unreflexively. Applied to CE specifically (Shove and Rinkinen 2023, #R69WZQ): if CE is committed to "efficient flow," it makes the constitution of need a secondary question. It treats consumption as something to be optimised rather than transformed. Practice theory says: the volume and pace of throughput is itself produced by the practices CE leaves untouched. This is the **"don't optimise the wrong thing"** critique. Practice theory is a tool for seeing what CE's metrics render invisible. ### 2. The consumption work / labour critique (Wheeler, Glucksmann, Hobson, Welch et al.) A specific extension: even if you accept CE's goals, achieving them requires huge amounts of **labour** that CE policy doesn't account for. Wheeler and Glucksmann (#4LST57) developed the concept for household recycling — sorting, rinsing, transporting — and showed it was gendered, unpaid, and structurally necessary. Hobson, Welch, Holmes and Wieser (#NUEUVY) extended it to circular economy more broadly: as you do more of the loop yourself, the consumer becomes a worker. This is the **"who does the work and who pays for it"** critique. It's compatible with practice theory but more explicitly political. ### 3. The anthropological / ethnographic critique This is more diffuse but important. Several traditions converge here: - **Material culture / object biography** (Appadurai, Kopytoff, Miller, Bohlin and Appelgren): things have social lives, value is multiple, circulation transforms objects rather than just moving them. - **Anthropology of waste and reuse** (Gille, Reno, Isenhour, Martínez, Hawkins, Alexander, Sosna): waste is not a residual category but a productive site where value is made and unmade. - **Anthropology of care, repair, and quiet sustainability** (Smith and Jehlička, Mosgaard and Moalem, Corwin and Gidwani, Martínez): sustainable practices that don't articulate themselves in sustainability terms; care as the relational substrate of repair and reuse. - **Anthropology of post-socialist thrift and second-hand** (Alexander and Sosna, Gille, Holmes, Hulme, Kuppinger): historically situated practices of making-do that pre-exist and exceed the CE framing. The anthropological critique says, roughly: **CE is a young Western policy abstraction that flattens older, more various, more morally complex practices of circulation into a single technocratic loop.** Things have meanings, people have biographies with objects, communities have moral economies that won't reduce to flow metrics. ## Where your thesis sits Your thesis sits at the **intersection of (1) and (2)**, with significant **but currently mostly implicit** moves toward (3). - The framework you've explicitly chosen is practice theory (Shove) + consumption work (Wheeler/Glucksmann), updated through Hobson's CE-specific applications and recent care-theoretical extensions (Tölg, Mesiranta et al., Närvänen et al.). - Your **method** is ethnographic, your **discipline** is anthropology, your sensibility is about plurality, moral economy, biographical attachment, "purgatory for things" — all anthropological registers. - Your **chapter 4 argument** (plurality, moral economy, quiet sustainability) is doing more anthropological work than the framework chapter currently acknowledges. The Bohlin and Appelgren paper, the Bohlin "It will keep circulating" paper, the Smith and Jehlička concept, the Martínez waste-as-care line, Bankovska's care not-work — these are anthropological resources you're using, and they share a sensibility that's distinct from Shove's sociological practice theory. So a more accurate framing of your thesis's position might be: > **CE is a dominant governance paradigm rooted in industrial ecology and ecological modernisation, treating circulation as an engineering and market-design problem with throughput as its measure. Critics in the practice-theoretical tradition (Shove, Hobson, Welch) have argued that this framing misreads how circulation is organised in everyday life, both as routinised practice (Shove) and as distributed labour (Wheeler and Glucksmann, Hobson). This thesis builds on that critique ethnographically: through participant observation in a Riga swapshop, it shows that the circulation CE policy depends on is sustained not by efficient flow but by a plural moral economy and the gendered, care-laden consumption work of the people who keep it running.** That's a paragraph that places you precisely in the conversation. The practice-theory-plus-consumption-work apparatus is your *toolkit*; the ethnographic finding about plurality, friction, and moral economy is your *contribution*. ## A small flag One thing worth being explicit about: practice theory in Shove's mature form is **sociology**, not anthropology. It's compatible with anthropology, and Bankovska's thesis is one good example of an anthropologist using it well — but it's not native to your discipline. Your thesis can lean into the anthropological tradition more than it currently does (object biography, moral economy, care, post-socialist material life) without losing the practice-theoretical scaffolding. That would let your contribution sit more comfortably as **anthropology of circulation in a CE policy moment** rather than **applied practice theory with ethnographic data**. Worth deciding consciously how much of that to do given your deadline — but it's a real choice. ### 27. User so maybe then brivbode is a particularly interesting case study because it is clearly a circular kind of thing, probably also eu funded, etc, ostensibly a sustainability initiative, ... but some things about it prevent it from becoming a kind of funnel or endpoint or legible part of economic systems? and umm this is tied up with its being a generative space... it's not charity, not a market, not a bin..... it does something that's contrary to the CE paradigm, and that something is in a way itself somehow ethnographic or anthropological.... ??? ### 28. Assistant Yes — and I think you've just articulated the spine of your contribution. Let me push it back at you sharpened, because I think this is the framing the thesis has been reaching for. ## What you've just said, restated Brīvbode is **a textbook circular-economy initiative on paper**: volunteer-run reuse infrastructure, diverts textiles from landfill, plausibly aligns with EU CE Action Plan and the Latvian textile collection mandate, the kind of place that would happily appear in a policy report as a "community-based circular initiative." Its outputs are legible to CE accounting (tonnes diverted, items rerouted to textile collection, etc.). But ethnographically — and this is the move — **the things that make it actually work, that recruit and retain its participants, that sustain it across years, are precisely the things that make it illegible to CE accounting.** Plurality of meaning. Moral economy that bends. Friction as constitutive. A "purgatory for things." Aiga's thirty trips. Madara learning to switch off "free." The wire offcuts no one will tell her aren't being used. Witnessing circulation. Knowing whose things are whose. The shop as social rhythm, as biographical infrastructure, as a route for ethical labour you can't help doing. Brīvbode is **not** a charity (organisers actively resist that), **not** a market (no price), **not** a bin (it actively curates against waste), and **not** a CE node (it refuses optimization in practice). It sits in a negative space defined by what it isn't, and the positive content of that space is — as you say — irreducibly anthropological. It's held together by the kind of social fabric ethnography is uniquely equipped to describe and policy is uniquely poorly equipped to register. ## Why this works conceptually You have the citations to back this up almost exactly: **Hobson's "generative spaces"** (#NB8CR8) is precisely the concept you want. She introduced it in 2016 as the alternative to CE's industrial-systems imagination: sites of "everyday activism" and "vital materialism" where citizens are not nodes accepting redesigned products but designers, repairers, prosumers. Brīvbode is exactly such a generative space, and the things that make it generative are exactly the things CE metrics can't see. **Bohlin and Appelgren's "Harnessing the Unruly"** (#B3CVMW) — the title alone is your argument in three words. They're explicitly about anthropological contributions to applied reuse projects, and the "unruly" is what reuse keeps producing that engineering and policy approaches struggle to absorb. Worth reading carefully if you haven't recently — it likely says exactly what you're saying. **Smith and Jehlička's quiet sustainability** (#WVG7HV) is the same logic in different vocabulary: practices that produce sustainable outcomes precisely *because* they are not articulated as sustainability, not market-mediated, not legible to the CE register. **Martínez's "waste is not the end"** (#6C82ER) and the wider anthropology-of-care-and-repair literature: care is not a metric, and the maintenance of ordinary material life happens in registers that resist quantification. ## The reframe this opens up If you adopt this framing, the thesis stops being *"an ethnographic study of a CE initiative that adds nuance to CE policy"* and becomes something more pointed: > **An ethnographic argument that the very features which make community reuse projects work are the features the CE paradigm cannot register, and that this illegibility is not a flaw in the paradigm to be patched but a constitutive limit of its modernist-optimization framing.** Brīvbode is then interesting *because* it sits inside the CE policy moment and refuses to behave as CE imagines. It's neither outside CE (it's funded and legitimised by exactly that environment) nor reducible to it. That double position — *legible enough to be supported, illegible enough to remain itself* — is what makes it ethnographically and politically interesting. And the "something" that resists, as you put it, **is itself ethnographic**. By which I mean: the participants are practicing something that anthropology has long described — plural value, moral economy, situated negotiation, biographical attachment to objects, gift-like circulation that isn't gift, threshold spaces — and they're doing it inside an institutional environment that increasingly tries to make all this legible as flow. The ethnography is not just describing the practice; it is recognising that the practice is doing the same kind of work ethnography does, against the same kind of reductions. That's a thesis with bite. ## What it would mean for the writing You don't need to rewrite — most of the argument is already there in the empirical chapters. What changes: - The **introduction** can declare this position more openly. Right now #J4M2WK is concessive ("CE policy depends on labour-intensive practices, this thesis describes some of them"). It could be directive: this thesis argues that CE's framing systematically misreads what makes circulation work, and Brīvbode is a case where that misreading is visible. - The **theoretical chapter** can acknowledge that practice theory and consumption work are your tools for *making the anthropological argument* — not the argument itself. - The **conclusion** is where the throughput-vs-friction / generative-space / illegibility argument lands. Right now the conclusion is mostly summary; it could be the place this whole framing finally crystallises. - Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 already do most of the work. They just need to be read by the reader as evidence for *this* argument. A working sentence for the introduction, if it's useful: > *Brīvbode is the kind of initiative that the European Union's Circular Economy Action Plan would happily count among its successes: a volunteer-run reuse site that diverts textiles from landfill at the edge of a city. But this thesis argues that the features which make Brīvbode work — its plural moral economy, the friction of valuation without price, the gendered care-laden labour of keeping it open, the biographical and relational attachments that route things through it — are precisely the features the CE paradigm cannot register. This illegibility is not a gap to be closed by better metrics; it is what generative spaces of circulation look like when ethnography rather than throughput accounting is doing the describing.* That's the shape of it. You're not adding an argument — you're naming the one you've already made.