Waste is a visible symptom of deeper systemic issues. Across Aotearoa New Zealand, organisations, councils, iwi and communities are striving to move beyond the linear logic of take–make–dispose toward circular ways of organising production and consumption, mindful of care for both land and people. However, intentionality alone provides no guarantee of systems transformation. In reality, decision makers still face a host of practical barriers – e.g., energy limitations, infrastructure gaps, supermarket led packaging systems, and policy settings attuned to linearity – as well as conceptual roadblocks that favour status quo over the often complex, relational work required to make circularity real.
Our report is an attempt to shift that reality. We explore where and why circularity is hindered, what types of social and technical innovation are currently emerging, and how ‘better’ measurement can help us identify ‘better’ investments. We begin by situating circular economy as more than just a design toolkit or a new label for recycling. At its strongest, circularity calls for integrated, place-based systems in which resources are reduced, repaired, reused, and only then remanufactured or safely returned to nature.
In Aotearoa, such aspirations intersect with Māori economic thinking that is regenerative, relational and inherently circular – spirality: cycles that return and evolve rather than simply close. Recognising this heritage challenges narrow interpretations of circular economy and highlights reciprocity, kaitiakitanga and rangatiratanga as foundational for transition.
In this industry insights report, we summarise insights from our 2025 Measuring Circular Economies Symposium, featuring keynote speaker Dr Jay Whitehead (Matatihi), and keynote respondents Assoc Prof Stephen Healy (Western Sydney University) and Professor Abby Mellick Lopes (UTS). The report finds that many of the challenges of measuring circular economies come from uncertainty about what to measure and how to measure it. The report was funded by Massey University and was part of a one year project carried out by a team including Kelly Dombroski, Nitha Palakshappa, Derrylea Hardy, Sita Venkateswar, Georgia McLellan and Gradon Diprose.
We hope to use the insights from this report to inform future work in the area of circular economy return on investment tool design.
Our Marsden team (Reduce, Reuse, Repair) published a new report about how to move up the waste hierarchy. It was authored by Gradon Diprose (Bioeconomy Science Institute) and Dorte Wray (Zero Waste Aotearoa).
Guest post by Dr Gradon Diprose, Bioeconomy Science Institute.
Why we wrote this report
We know there are huge problems with waste. For example, New Zealand produces a lot of waste compared to other OECD countries, and our central and local government’s focus is on managing waste, not preventing it. While the waste hierarchy has been around for years it is still not reflected in many government’s operational policies or actual investment. This is partly because the waste hierarchy conflicts with many countries GDP growth-oriented economic goals, and the vested interests of powerful industries. The key question for us is how to encourage social and political shifts towards waste prevention given these challenges.
For this report, we researched what collective practices help communities and businesses to prevent waste and build the wider social and political support for waste prevention more broadly. We interviewed people from businesses, local government, and non-governmental organisations and civil society groups who work on waste prevention and supplemented this with a literature review. We asked participants what had practically helped them, their businesses, and wider communities shift from waste management to waste prevention. We also asked participants how they did this. For example, what kinds of language they use, and what they invest in and prioritise.
What is in the report (and isn’t)
The report identifies four interconnected collective practices that help build the social and political pressure to make waste prevention a priority.
The report is not about how to manage waste through individual behaviour change. For example, how to recycle better, how to address problem waste streams, or the best waste disposal options.
What we learned through our research
Our participants and the research literature highlight that governments need to set new rules like mandatory product stewardship, extended producer responsibility and right to repair to shift economic systems towards waste prevention. The four interconnected collective practices that help build the social and political pressure for this new legislation are:
Supporting collectives and networks
Investing in place-based initiatives
Using data to demonstrate impact
Using language strategically to frame change
Who is this report for?
We wrote this report for those people and organisations already taking action on waste prevention, and for those who are concerned and want to take action. We also wrote it for funders, public servants and elected officials who might want to support waste prevention and wider systems change but don’t know where to start. The report helps to show what is already in motion and what is working.
What’s next?
We will be running cooperative inquiry groups (a kind of action research approach using focus groups) with New Zealanders who are interested in waste prevention. These groups will explore people’s everyday practical actions and deeper meanings and emotions associated with waste prevention. Shifting towards waste prevention will require significant and deep social changes. These cooperative enquiry groups will explore some of these shifts. Such as how people come to desire consuming less (reduce), how the negotiate their relationships with others in the process.
By Dr Lila Laird, Postdoctoral Researcher, Massey University
What is the project about?
We are embarking on a project that traces how groups of people move up the ‘waste hierarchy’ and how such transformations shape people’s sense of self in relation to waste. This matters because issues like microplastic pollution, environmental contaminant leaching, and dwindling landfill space continue to negatively impact ecosystems and communities. In order for Aotearoa to avoid further waste crises, our use and disposal of material goods must change. Despite warnings and ample evidence, plastic, metal, organic material, food, excrement and building waste continue to grow.
Shifting towards ‘circular economies’ is often proposed to stop such crises and to avoid the linear take-make-dispose model. Instead, a circular economy keeps resources in use for as long as possible, and the waste hierarchy (pictured below) conveys the kinds of actions that are most beneficial in circulating materials for reuse. Near the top of the waste hierarchy includes reduce, reuse and repair, and these are the forms of circular economy we are most interested in investigating.
The Waste Hierarchy — we should be doing more the top and less of the bottom!
Circular economy research often points to high tech advancements, hoping to deal with our waste and also create business value from it. However, these ‘solutions’ do not often lead to less waste! Instead, they often end up adapting to the current flows of waste being produced. Social scientists researching circular economy practices have found that in order to reduce, reuse, and repair materials, large amounts of often invisible or undervalued labour is required.
In simple terms, it takes a fair amount of people-power to wash, sort, clean, store and transport resources for their reuse. Or to undertake research, connect with knowledgeable people, upskill oneself, and foster patience to repair an item to keep it in use. And it takes a significant amount of effort to avoid waste altogether. Therefore, because a circular economy is a matter of who is engaged and what kinds of action they are taking, our research is interested in meeting with people focused on being less wasteful and keeping their items in use.
Waste is a culturally situated concept. Different cultural groups have different norms and taboos with regards to waste, including what is considered necessary waste. Different cultural groups also have different kinds of relationships to land and the ways land is currently used to ‘deal with’ waste. For example, in te ao Māori, understandings of tapu and noa might guide waste disposal in different ways from western norms. All of this difference is an important part of the ways people approach waste, and what moving up the waste hierarchy may look like for them. And these differences provide important insights into the challenges and solutions to current waste crises.
What does the project involve?
We have partnered with three important organisations who help people in Aotearoa to become less wasteful.
Para Kore is a Māori zero-waste organisation. Para Kore educates and advocates from a Māori worldview for zero carbon and zero waste in Māori communities and beyond. They run sustainability programs across Aotearoa, working with marae, iwi, early childhood centres, churches, community organisations, businesses and more.
Repair Network Aotearoa is a charitable trust that works with repair cafes and similar projects like tool libraries and maker spaces across Aotearoa, advocating for the right to repair legislation in Aotearoa.
Zero Waste Aotearoa is an organisation that supports over 150 groups across Aotearoa that are working towards zero waste in their local community.
To explore our interests in waste and identity, we are undertaking field work with our research partners and collectives engaged in practices at the top of the waste hierarchy. We will also be undertaking cooperative inquiry groups that enable us to bring together like-minded people to explore their practices relating to waste and to items that could become waste, their concerns and feelings surrounding waste, and what they would like to change in relation to waste practices for themselves and their wider collectives.
Who is this research for?
By the end of the project, we will have co-created an action plan with our community partners that identifies how government and community can invest in social innovations needed for circular economies in Aotearoa. The action plan will support practices at the top of the waste hierarchy and will be directed at waste decision-makers in community and government. As many people grapple with the waste that enters their households, workplaces, marae, community centres and the nature surrounding them, we hope that our action plan can help to bring us one step closer to a waste-less Aotearoa.
What’s next?
We are currently connecting with collectives on the ground who are engaged in actions of reduce, reuse and repair. This includes repair cafes, textile recovery groups, resourceful-craft organizations, makerspaces, tool libraries, community composters, and more. We look forward to keeping you informed of what we find out in the process!
You can find out more about who is involved in the project here:
Ben is a co-funded Masters student studying economic change in the small town of Pātea, Taranaki. I’m part of his supervisory team and took a trip out to Pātea to meet up with Ben and have a look around South Taranaki.
Tell us a bit about your background and how you got interested in economic geography
I’m originally from North Taranaki, in fact I’m currently there now studying by distance. I went to study geography at Massey Manawatū straight out of school. I came to the topic because geography allows for academic diversity, being able to address topics and borrow ideas from other physical and social sciences. Economic geography is a particular interest as I can explore impacts of and solutions to capitalism’s flaws.
What are you working on now?
I’m currently completing my Masters’ thesis, where I am exploring people’s responses to change in the context of a small town, Pātea. This project includes a media analysis and semi-structured interviews with community leaders.
What do you think the biggest challenges will be?
One of the biggest challenges in my research is the interviewing. Having never done anything like this before, I have found it a difficult process to work through: planning interview questions, conducting interviews, and then discovering mistakes or oversights made, during transcription and analysis. It has definitely been one of those skills that can’t be just read about – it has to be continuously tried and improved for oneself, but I do think I am much better at interviews now than I was before my first.
What are some of the surprising or interesting things you have discovered in your fieldwork so far?
An interesting part of Pātea is the culture which stands in contrast to statistics and some media coverage. It has been evident with everybody I’ve talked to that they understand their community is sometimes called ‘lower socioeconomic’ by others. But they reject this as a sole identity and instead have embraced an engaging community lifestyle where local people and families can thrive peacefully and cooperatively. While there are certainly economic challenges, to identify a community like this only as ‘poor’ is to miss the point entirely. It is also clear that this identity is constantly shaped by the community leaders I talked to, who are passionate about their place, and inspire others to share in that passion.
Ben Lily is researching people’s responses to change in Pātea as part of a Master’s project funded by the John McArthur Scholarship in Geography
Great news! We are now able to confirm the PhD scholarship in Transitioning to caring economies has been awarded to Swarnima Kriti.
Swarnima is an action researcher in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. She has both lived and worked in a small Indigenous village with a group of young women interested in questions of gender, development and ecology. Together, Swarnima and the other young women have set up a cooperative called Chinhari: The Young India (www.chinhari.co.in). Swarnima has completed an MPhil in Development Practice, and published some articles. Her latest published article is “Hegel and India” at The GCAS Review.
Swarnima will join the caring economies project and be based at Massey Palmerston North, while living in Porirua and back in Chhattisgarh for parts of the PhD project. Her project includes enabling a creative and constructive exchange of learning between communities doing community-based economic innovation in India and New Zealand. Our research partners in Porirua are Te Hiko centre for economic innovation. I asked Swarnima a couple of questions in the lead-up to her big shift to Aotearoa New Zealand.
What attracted you to the Transitioning to caring economies project?
The Transitioning to caring economies project attracted me because of two reasons. One, it gave me the opportunity to learn about collective economic subjects, their actions and institutions. And two, it focused on “writing rights” i.e. writing about efforts communities put into finding sustainable ways of life than “writing wrongs”. These learnings become important for action researchers like me to create a confluence of alternatives nurturing post capitalist practices.
What do you think the biggest challenges will be in completing your PhD at Massey?
I believe my biggest challenge in completing this PhD would be my field work in New Zealand, especially building a relationship with communities there. My work in the past has been largely based on my strong relationships with the community. It may be challenging to juggle between understanding the community, living with them, creating relationships and minimizing the cultural gap.
We look forward to having Swarnima arrive and join us at Massey and the Community Economies Research Network NZ, beginning in November 2023!
Swarnima is an accomplished action researcher interested in community-led economic innovation.
Measuring and communicating the holistic wellbeing outcomes of community intiatives is often difficult, time-consuming and can miss important intentions and outcomes. Our recent report documents our 3 year project with Christchurch organisation Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS), trialling a method of evaluating wellbeing outcomes of 27 of the more than 700 projects supported by LiVS over ten years.
Enabling Life in Vacant Spaces: A partnership approach to evaluating holistic wellbeing in disaster recovery projects reports on our experiment with a “Community Economy Return on Investment Approach” combined with a holistic urban wellbeing tool based on evidence-based urban wellbeing actions for change. We found that this way of assessing holistic wellbeing ‘returns’ on investment could help communicate outcomes in a more holistic way.
However, we found that the method still relies on some expert input and some more time-consuming qualitative and relational methods.
Next steps are to develop then test a community-based ‘how to’ guide that helps community groups develop their own methods for assessing their holistic wellbeing returns. The report will be a useful start point for community groups, local government and funding agencies to think about how they approach evaluation for both human and environmental outcomes with reference to the ‘inputs’ of investment — both financial investment and investments of time and energy!
This report was part of a the Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities Urban Wellbeing National Science Challenge. The first two years of my Transitioning to Caring Economies through Transformative Community Investment research programme specifies collaboration with the Urban Wellbeing stream. The report was authored by Kelly Dombroski, Gradon Diprose, Matt Scobie and Amanda Yates.
Detail from painting by Inge Flinte — hopefully it will feature on the cover of one of the books coming out!
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year already since I started at Massey and began working on this project fulltime. Recently I had to complete an annual report, which provides a nice opportunity to reflect on what I have been doing. Here are the highlights:
Transforming the way we think about economies
Finished off and submitted Caring for Life: A postdevelopment politics of infant hygiene. It’s now in production with University of Minnesota Press and will be available by the end of the 2023. While infant hygiene might not seem related to economies, the book develops an approach to studying places built on pluriversal thinking. Nappy-free hygiene practices in the Global South are understood as important innovations for Global North communities who need to rethink their resource use.
Finished off an submitted Introducing Human Geographies, 4th edition, co-edited with Paul Cloke, Mark Goodwin, Junxi Qian and Andy Williams. This global textbook is in production with Routledge, and was a complete revision and redesign of the text that included a diverse range of authors from all over the world. I worked particularly on the ‘Collaborations’ section, which envisions the next generation of geographic education and research.
Taught the Aotearoa node of the intensive winter school Researching Postcapitalist Possibilities. PhD and early career scholars from NZ and Australia converged on Palmerston North for 10 days of immersive learning in poststructural action research, community economies, and researching with postcapitalist possibilities in mind.
Inventorying diverse economies with postcapitalist potential
I have begun collaborating with the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, including Gareth Hughes’ listening tour, and the WEALL Economy for Public Good conference. In each of these I learn about new and old projects all over Aotearoa.
I have begun collaborating with the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, although I had to cancel a planned trip to their Global Congress in Kenya. This group is an alliance of transition groups form all over the world, with leadership from the Global South.
We have completed an in-depth report on the wellbeing outcomes of the work of Life in Vacant Spaces in a post-disaster context in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
Did some experimental work with a quantitative version of a Community Economy Return on Investment tool, with the help of a wonderful intern from Norway. We will continue to work on developing this in both quantiative and qualitative versions as part of this research programme.
I have begun a new case study of Christian and post-Christian postcapitalist subjectivities and activism, with ethics approval, a book contract and co-author all lined up!
Key findings in 2023
Communities are already investing in transition to postcapitalist and caring economies and there is extensive innovation that is not yet present in the literature. Part of the issue is that social innovation is not always recognised, particularly if it is done in marginalised and low-income groups, regions or nations.
Global interconnections are being made, particularly between networks in the Global South, that have well-developed bottom-up theories of economic change.
Subjectivities (or sense of self as an actor) play a role in community investment – we have found this in particular with alternative waste infrastructure that contributes to more circular community economies.
New metrics are needed and desired by community organisations who want to represent the transformative work they do outside of monetary frameworks.
