Circular Consumption Practices as Matters of Care

While a circular economy (CE) paradigm shift has gained significant momentum among academics, practitioners, and policymakers, theory regarding its social aspects remains scant, especially theory based on an ethical, micro-level perspective. Circular consumption, referring to those consumption practices that aim to extend the lifetimes of objects and materials, involves ethical considerations. However, everyday circular consumption and its ethics have not gained a foothold in the CE literature. This article builds on the existing circular consumption literature by drawing insights from the posthuman feminist theorising of care, shifting the focus of care from humans to the complex relations between humans and nonhumans and conceptualising circular consumption practices as matters of care. This conceptualisation, which follows a thinking-with-theory approach, is based on empirical material constructed in two research projects focusing on frontrunner consumers in terms of circular consumption in Finland: food waste reduction and circular clothing consumption. We identify circular consumption as care by introducing three distinct perspectives: care as tinkering, care as affective practices, and care as ethico-political action. We show that approaching circular consumption practices as matters of care, while not always easy or straightforward, is an attempt to make consumption better: more attentive, inclusive, durable, and enjoyable. Our findings emphasise the interconnected nature of circular practices, the constant performativity of circular consumption, and nonhumans as crucial stakeholders in care relations. Consequently, we offer an alternative to technocentric CE perspectives and a way to promote a sustainable world through care.

Keywords Care · Circular consumption · Feminist ethics · Ethics of care · Posthumanism · Qualitative study

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

et al., 2017, p. 299). Despite increasing efforts to boost CE, a circularity gap is widening (Circle Economy Foundation, 2024). The gap denotes to the fact that while CE is gaining popularity and traction in policymaking, academia and businesses alike, global circularity (the share of secondary materials consumed by the global economy) is in decline, and the consumption of material resources continues to accelerate (Circle Economy Foundation, 2024). One reason for this may be that the social aspects to CE have received less attention than its economic and environmental aspects (Zavos et al., 2024) and, especially, ethical and moral aspects (Murray et al., 2017).

In this study, we focus on everyday circular consumption and its ethics, which have rarely been considered in the CE literature (for exceptions, see Conduit et al., 2023; Lehtokunnas et al., 2022; Rabiu & Jaeger-Erben, 2022). This is surprising given that circular consumption entails various ethical considerations, trade-offs, and conflicts (Lehtokunnas et al., 2022; Sutcliffe, 2022). Circular consumption refers to those consumption practices that are

conducted to extend the lifetimes of objects and materials (see also Rabiu & Jaeger-Erben, 2022). We view circular consumption as a subtype of ethical consumption, which we understand, in line with Garcia-Ruiz and Rodriguez-Lluesma (2014), as including “all types of practices as long as they are integrated into the individual’s search for a morally good life and contribute to the good of the community in which she lives” (p. 525). In circular consumption, the environmental aspects of ethics become highlighted (Carrington et al., 2021) because it is focused on the concrete use of materials in everyday consumption in less resource-intensive ways than in a linear consumerist society. Thus, the environmental impacts of one’s consumption habits are central, rather than, for example, considerations related to the corporate social responsibility of the company one is purchasing from. Furthermore, we focus on ethics, which we define as mundane, situated negotiations of various goods and bads. Our definition is inspired by Mol’s work (2008; see also Mol et al., 2010), which shows that enacting ‘good’ or ‘bad’ care is a practical accomplishment attained by carefully attuning oneself to specific circumstances. Rather than adopting absolute definitions (i.e. good versus bad care), we use the plural form ‘goods and bads’. This phrasing highlights the ongoing work required to determine what is ethical or unethical in a given situation. Approaching ethics in this way resonates with our focus on everyday consumption practices and enables us to respond to the recent call for research in the circular consumption literature that addresses how consumers are “made to feel responsible and come to express an ethics of care” (Hobson et al., 2021, p. 6).

An ethics of care perspective (Fisher & Tronto, 1990; Tronto, 1993, 2013) has been adopted by ethical consumption scholars, such as members of the Care Collective. In their Care Manifesto, it has been noted that the world we live in is structurally careless and that to create a sustainable, inclusive future, more care is needed at multiple levels on the part of various actors (Chatzidakis et al., 2020). We join this discussion and continue the Hobson et al.’s (2021) call to explore circular consumption through the lens of the ethics of care. We argue that care does exist within the circular consumption practices of frontrunner consumers who interact with various consumption objects on a daily basis to extend their lifetimes. These frontrunners have actively sought to change their own everyday consumption practices and move towards circularity and have shared and discussed these practices with others either on social media or in their local community. Frontrunners’ circular consumption practices have developed over the course of their lives because of complex processes, including “socialisation experiences, and continually evolving personal relationships, social roles, material contexts and forms of capital” (Greene & Royston, 2022, p. 272; see also Ortega Alvarado et al., 2023).

In the CE, materials and resources are constantly changing form. They can be processed into products that are repaired or reused before being transformed into materials that can be utilised again (Godfrey et al., 2022). These processes are reciprocal. Materials and the devices and appliances with which they are circulated have effects on people, enabling and constraining circular consumption (Mattila et al., 2019), while human actions influence the lives of these materials. Thus, when considering care and ethics in circular consumption, the active roles of materials, objects, devices, and technologies must be acknowledged. We argue that this leads to a balanced understanding of CE not only in the onto-epistemological sense but also in terms of ethics, as it shows how nonhumans are affected by human consumption. By doing so, we also join the discussion begun by Sayers et al. (2022) on the role of nonhumans in business ethics, which uses a feminist lens to question dualist thinking about the mastery by humans over nonhumans.

To acknowledge the active role of more-than-human actors, this article draws on posthuman feminist theorising of care (Mol, 2008, 2021; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2010). This tradition conceptualises care in relation to more-than-human worlds, allowing often-silenced and unnoticed sociomaterial relations to become visible. In this theorising, the focus is shifted from the ethics of care to matters of care, which are understood as nonnormative obligations that consist of hands-on labours of caring, affects, and affection, as well as ethico-political dimensions (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, 2017). In practice, these matters of care may include, for example, the potentially anxiety-inducing task of rummaging in the fridge for soon-to-expire foodstuffs because one thinks food waste should be avoided. Care is seen as weaving a messy, multispecies ‘web of life’, emphasising the interdependency of all living beings and the necessity of care for these beings to live together ‘as well as possible’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 4). This makes it possible to decentre human agencies and pay attention to how human and nonhuman beings become entangled in complex relations of care. Consequently, we can appreciate how consumers and the stuff of consumption become involved in various doings and sayings of care or the lack thereof.

In this article, we ask the following question: How are circular consumption practices enacted as matters of care? We adopt a thinking-with-theory approach (Jackson & Mazzei, 2011, 2013) wherein the posthuman feminist theorising of care shaped our engagement with the empirical world. Our empirical material was constructed in two research projects in Finland focusing on frontrunner consumers in different forms of circular consumption: food waste reduction and circular clothing consumption. These two complementary contexts helped us to conceptually develop our interpretation of circular consumption practices as matters of care. The article contributes primarily to literature on circular

consumption by extending our understanding of consumer work (Hobson et al., 2021; Korsunova et al., 2022; Rabiu & Jaeger-Erben, 2022, 2024; Sutcliffe, 2022) and the ethical and moral aspects of circular consumption (Conduit et al., 2023; Lehtokunnas et al., 2022), as well as introducing the sociomaterial approach. Furthermore, the article has implications for practitioners regarding how circular consumption practices, as matters of care, can be supported holistically.

Next, we discuss the previous literature on circular consumption, followed by introducing matters of care as our theoretical perspective. Then, we introduce our empirical approach and discuss the three dimensions of care regarding the circular consumption of food and clothing. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings.

Despite increasing research and policy attention, the CE literature has long been dominated by technocentric and ecologically modernist perspectives (Calisto Friant et al., 2021; Hobson & Lynch, 2016; Zavas et al., 2024). However, there is an emerging stream of literature on the role of everyday consumption in the transition to the CE (Camacho-Otero et al., 2018; Hobson et al., 2021). For materials to circulate in the economy, consumers are required to reduce the number of new purchases, repair and reuse their existing products, and recycle materials effectively. As simple as it may sound, adopting these new circular solutions in consumers' everyday lives is not an easy endeavour, irrespective of their intentions and motivations (Rabiu & Jaeger-Erben, 2024).

Drawing on the sociology of consumption and human geography, various authors have highlighted the fact that everyday social practices, consisting of interlinking elements, such as materials, meanings, and competencies (Shove et al., 2012), are at stake when considering consumers and consumption in the context of CE (Camacho-Otero et al., 2020; Greene et al., 2024; Mylan et al., 2016). Circular consumption can thus be defined as enacting practices that reduce resource use and prolong the lifetimes of material resources (Rabiu & Jaeger-Erben, 2022).

Previous research on circular practices has emphasised the labour, time, and effort required of consumers in a CE, which are labelled consumer work (Hobson et al., 2021; Rabiu & Jaeger-Erben, 2024; Sutcliffe, 2022). These studies highlight the fact that this domestic work is unpaid, not necessarily distributed evenly between consumers, and dependent on access to material infrastructures. Thus, it is apparent that consumer work can be burdensome and involve negative feelings and trade-offs for consumers. These trade-offs may

occur due to contradictory social norms that guide consumption, such as how people are expected to use their time for various everyday activities (Sutcliffe, 2022), or the value assigned to various goals, such as health, cleanliness, and family well-being, by society (Camacho-Otero et al., 2020; Lehtokunnas et al., 2022; Mylan et al., 2016). This raises the following question: Why would consumers still be willing to engage in circular practices?

Only a few studies have proposed adopting an ethical or moral perspective to understand circular consumption. Conduit et al. (2023) focus on reconceptualising consumers in a CE as user-stewards and propose that people have an intrinsic motivation to act responsibly and protect the resources surrounding them. However, Lehtokunnas et al. (2022) claim that this kind of responsibility and ethical subjectivity are not innate in human beings but, rather, must be constituted as a moral project in everyday life. Acknowledging that consumption in a CE has this ethical dimension does not mean returning to an individualistic view (people cannot simply decide to act ethically). Instead, it allows new ways of examining the mundane, situated negotiations of various goods and bads in everyday life. Furthermore, this situatedness indicates that ethical action in circular consumption is not static or fixed but, rather, continuously formed in relation with the surrounding world, including other people but also more-than-human creatures and things. According to Hobson et al. (2021), circular consumption involves the ethics of care, which is why this perspective is particularly fruitful. While circular consumption research has addressed care in its literal sense (taking care of objects; Conduit et al., 2023; Godfrey et al., 2022), it has not provided theory about the ethics of care. We argue that the ethics of care extends circular consumption research on consumer work and circular practices by offering an alternative framing for these efforts.

The ethics of care refers to a feminist approach in which relations and practices of care and responsibility are considered a fundamental feature of all human social life (Robinson, 1999; Tronto, 1993). Since the 1980s, the ethics of care has highlighted the importance of the relationality and interdependency of actors, as well as vulnerability and embodiment, often contrasting them with rights-based approaches that root ethics in abstract rationality and autonomy (Gilligan, 1982; Tronto, 1993; see also Godin, 2022). According to a popular definition created by Fisher and Tronto (1990, p. 40), care "includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible". This definition expands the web of caring to include not only human relationships but also relationships between humans and the environment or the biosphere.

Tronto's (1993, 2013) phases of care portrays care as taking place between a caregiver and a care receiver and outlines how care proceeds from awareness to action and becomes aligned with moral principles (e.g. Parsons et al., 2021b; Pizzetti et al., 2024; Shaw et al., 2016, 2017). Relying on Tronto's foundational work, ethical consumption researchers have portrayed care as dynamic and systemic in nature. Shaw et al. (2017), in their empirically grounded study, propose that care involves interdependencies between multiple stakeholders, such as consumers, producers, and retailers. Furthermore, Chatzidakis and Shaw (2018) propose a multilevel approach to care, highlighting the fact that sustainability initiatives require the consideration of caring at multiple scales, from the individual scale to the home, urban, national, and global scales. Importantly, the recent Care Manifesto calls for integrating care at all levels of society (Chatzidakis et al., 2020). Zooming in on environmental sustainability issues, the role of nature, as an important stakeholder in care, is highlighted (Chatzidakis et al., 2020; Wahlen & Stroude, 2023). As argued by the Care Collective, "as living creatures, we exist alongside and in connection with all other human and nonhuman beings, and also remain dependent upon the systems and networks, animate and inanimate, that sustain life across the planet" (Chatzidakis et al., 2020, p. 33). Building on this notion, more-than-human creatures and things should be integrated as part of the vision for universal care. We extend this idea by moving from the ethics of care to posthuman matters of care, which we discuss below.

In this article, we adopt a posthumanist approach to the ethics of care. In brief, posthumanist approaches emphasise the interdependency of the human and material worlds, questioning the human-centricity of social scientific research and, instead, mapping how understandings of humans as self-contained, rational, and sovereign are maintained at the expense of other nonhuman beings and environments (e.g. Bennett, 2010; Haraway, 2008, 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). These issues are by no means incompatible with the ethics of care approach, as detailed above. However, in recent years, a handful of scholars interested in studying care and the more-than-human have crafted theoretical resources that highlight, within a posthumanist perspective, the interdependencies of all things and beings and the situated, context-specific nature of care (e.g. Latimer, 2018; Mol, 2008; Mol et al., 2010; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). To reflect our emphasis on the nonhuman within care, we draw theoretical inspiration from this body of work and focus on 'matters of care' (a term borrowed from Puig de la Bellacasa, ). The term 'matters of care' refers to the everyday doings and sayings aimed at sustaining and supporting relations that

bring together the human and more-than-human 'as well as possible'. Indeed, centring the hands-on labour of caring in this way shows that focusing only on humans will lead to a severely restricted view. Caring means engaging with not only other humans but also the stuff of everyday life, other animals, and the environments we humans are embedded in. Consequently, ethics become grounded in "sociotechnical assemblages in mundane, ordinary, and pragmatic ways" (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 67).

Some studies have started to map how nonhuman beings, materials, and objects feature in care and consumption. Harbers et al. (2002) have shown that in the sociomaterial practices of a nursing home, food and drink are not just means of physical survival, but instead "media for care—they [food and drink] do care" (p. 217, italics original). Consequently, they contend that if we want to understand how various goods and bads are enacted within care practices, it is crucial to attend to the materialities of care (Harbers et al., 2002; see also Schwarz, 2018). Analysing assemblages of care that involve items for babies, such as blankets and soft toys, Waight and Boyer (2018) have also argued that paying attention to the more-than-human produces rich and nuanced understandings of care relations. They note that these relations are reciprocal. Matter 'cares' for children, and mothers care for matter. Finally, a strand of the literature has touched on the complexity of animals as objects of care within practices of meat consumption, highlighting the fact that caring cannot be reduced to clear-cut, feel-good doings (Bruckner & Kowasch, 2019; Ibáñez Martín & Mol, 2022; Koskinen, 2023b). It seems that research focused on the more-than-human, care, and consumption is somewhat sparse, being spread across various empirical contexts, and seemingly disconnected from the more prominent stream of research on the ethics of care and consumption discussed above. Nonetheless, this constellation of research demonstrates that dismantling the human-centricity of care relations can offer valuable insights into the ethics of consumption as practical, reciprocal, and situated.

We build on this nascent literature by engaging with María Puig de la Bellacasa's work on matters of care in more-than-human worlds (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, 2012, 2017, 2019). This helps us explicate how circular consumption practices, as matters of care, entail "affective, ethical, and hands-on agencies of practical and material consequence" (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 4). Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) builds on Fisher and Tronto's (1990) definition of care by crafting a posthumanist ethical project in which care is not a neutral analytical lens one can utilise but, rather, an intervention premised on recognising the vital necessity of care for multispecies worlds. Consequently, working with care "means standing for sustainable and flourishing relations, not merely survivalist or instrumental ones" (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 70). Puig de la Bellacasa's work

therefore enables us to approach care as a messy 'web of life', wherein multispecies beings and creatures together construct and (re)negotiate ways of living together 'as well as possible' (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 4). This decentres human agencies as the focus of inquiry while still remaining cognisant of "the predicaments and inheritances" of extant human doings (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 2).

More specifically, Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) conceptualises care using three dimensions: labour/work (the practical doings that maintain 'as well as possible' relations), affect/affections (from love and joy to frustration and shame), and ethics/politics (caring as situated, practical interventions, not universal normative judgments). While these dimensions may not be equally important in all situations or even interact harmoniously, all three are needed to enact care as a vital and intricate phenomenon that sustains life (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). In this article, we operationalise these three dimensions with the help of various theoretical resources to gain an in-depth understanding of care as a more-than-human matter. First, we frame labour/work as tinkering. Articulated within the context of care by Annemarie Mol (2008), tinkering refers to care as situated, experimental doings aimed at amelioration. Because the terrains of care are varied and changing, it is impossible to define, once and for all, how to carry out caring; thus, there is the need for tinkering. Second, we approach affect/affections through affective practices, as developed by Margaret Wetherell (2012). She emphasises that affective practices consist of both socio-cultural meaning making and embodied, sensual experiences. This makes them an apt concept for tracing affects within consumption practices (Koskinen, 2023a). Finally, to grasp the ethics/politics of care, we follow Puig de la Bellacasa's (2010) notion of "the ethical as a social practice", which connects the personal to the collective (p. 163). If care is seen as mundane doings necessary for maintaining our worlds, it becomes infused with ethics and politics in ways that dismantle traditional divisions between the public and the private. Before discussing these dimensions, we introduce our empirical materials, along with our thinking-with-theory approach, which represents an alternative to traditional qualitative inquiry.

The research approach adopted in this article is conceptually dominant and inspired by a turn towards post-qualitative inquiry in the social sciences (Mazzei, 2021; St. Pierre, 2021). This turn has its roots in feminist critiques of the dominant modes of knowledge production, which rely on a realistic depiction of qualitative data as something to

be collected, analysed, and systematically represented by researchers. Instead, post-qualitative inquiry is seen as something that "happens in the middle of things, in the threshold, as theoretical concepts and data constitute one another in an analytic practice of thinking with theory" (Mazzei, 2021, p. 198). The thinking-with-theory approach was developed by Jackson and Mazzei (2011, 2013) who argued that researchers should not be bound by method but, rather, be able to improvise as they engage with a problem and concepts. For us, the concept of care and the associated posthuman feminist theorising provided resources to think with. They mediated how we posed questions to the interviewees and what we focused on when reading our empirical material. For us, data did not passively represent the world. Instead, when engaging with the data through thinking with theory, the data encouraged us to theorise about them as matters of care. Thus, the data were constructing us, and we were constructing the data (see also Gherardi, 2019).

The empirical materials presented in this article were constructed in two research projects in Finland that aimed to investigate and advance circular consumption practices. The first project focused on reducing food waste, and the second focused on circular clothing consumption. Finland has been ranked as the second most sustainable country according to the Sustainable Competitiveness Ranking (SolAbility, 2023). In Finland, the transition to the CE has been highly visible in public discussions in the past few years. For example, the Finnish Government has set the aim of transforming the Finnish economy into a circular one by 2035 through a strategic programme for CE initiated in 2021 (Ministry of the Environment, 2024). In 2023, second-hand fashion became the largest product category in consumer-to-consumer online commerce in Finland, with an increase of 144% from 2015 (Finnish Commerce Federation, 2023). Food waste reduction has become visible in Finland through company, policy, and social media initiatives (see, e.g. Mesiranta et al., 2022; Närvänen et al., 2018; Sutinen, 2020). These include a national Food Waste Week campaign organised annually in September, special sections in supermarkets for soon-to-expire food items, as well as local food redistribution terminals and mobile applications focused on rescuing food that would otherwise be wasted.

Both food waste (e.g. Närvänen et al., 2020) and the clothing industry (e.g. Berg et al., 2020) have significant sustainability impacts, with associated environmental (e.g. the wastage of land, water, and energy) and social concerns (e.g. the increasing divide between affluent and low-income people and working conditions for employees). Therefore, it is essential to find solutions quickly to mitigate these harmful effects. These two contexts were, however, purposefully

chosen for this study to exemplify the various ways circular consumption is enacted as care. Both food and clothing are necessary in our everyday lives as humans, and we have numerous encounters with them every day. Thus, we were able to creatively engage with the data, as recommended in post-qualitative inquiry (Mazzei, 2021), from the perspective of our own (bodily) experiences and our experiences as researchers conducting empirical studies on circular consumption for several years (see also Gherardi, 2019). Both food and clothing are closely related to our bodies. Food is ingested, while clothing covers the body. From a caring perspective, food and clothing consumption becomes entangled with caring for others, whether that caring is manifested towards family members, fashion industry workers, or non-human animals. However, these contexts build on different timeframes. As pointed out by Mattila et al., (2019), food waste reduction is “a mission to act before the inevitable happens” (p. 1622), before food changes from edible to inedible (or becomes waste) through complex interactions with other more-than-human creatures and things, such as mould. The lifetimes of clothes are much longer, which enables

items to be worn and cared for by multiple human and non-human actors (see also Närvänen et al., 2023).

The empirical materials focus on who we perceive to be frontrunner consumers in Finland. Using three datasets (see Table 1), we investigated three main groups of consumers: (1) food bloggers participating in a food waste reduction campaign, (2) members of a local home economics non-profit organisation who were eager to learn food waste reduction practices, and (3) sustainable fashion influencers posting regularly about sustainable fashion and circular clothing consumption practices on social media. These groups have all sought to change their own food or clothing consumption practices and move towards circularity, and they have shared and discussed related practices with others, either on social media or within their local community. Overall, our empirical materials derived from the research projects mentioned above can be characterised as ethnographic, with multiple types of data, including online and offline personal interviews (18 in total); observations of online social media postings and their comments (500+ in total); and participant observation (cooking workshops with 31 consumers in total,

resulting in hundreds of short fieldnotes, videos, photos, and audio recordings). Consent to participate in the study was obtained from all consumers in either oral or written form.

Our analysis and interpretation processes progressed interactively. We have previously published articles based on separate datasets (Kaivonen et al., 2024; Lehtokunnas et al., 2022; Mattila et al., 2019; Närvänen et al., 2021; Närvänen et al., 2018, 2023). In those articles, the focus was not on care but, rather, consumers' food waste reduction efforts or the role of frontrunners in advancing circular consumption. The generated knowledge and our embodied understandings of the phenomena led us to adopt the feminist ethics of care theory. For this study, we began by jointly discussing the adoption of the care perspective in consumer research on circular consumption. At that time, we had already immersed ourselves in the distributed, more-than-human agencies involved in consumers' food waste reduction (Mattila et al., 2019), which also facilitated the ethnographically informed generation of data. For example, during the observations at the workshops on cooking to reduce food waste, we attuned ourselves to observing the materials that the consumers used (Woodward, 2019). Also, following the principles of object interviews (Holmes, 2020; Woodward, 2019), we asked the sustainable fashion influencers to bring their favourite second-hand fashion item with them, encouraging them to talk about materials and objects.

The understanding gained from these research endeavours guided us to adopt the feminist care ethics perspective (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2017, 2019) as our theoretical reading device. In the process of 'plugging-in' (Jackson & Mazzei, 2011), we ultimately used various theories related to feminist care ethics. 'Plugging in' is a metaphor for connecting different theoretical 'plugs' to the empirical 'socket' to highlight different aspects of the core phenomenon. In addition to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's work, we used Mol (2008) and Wetherell (2012) to think with our data, and we used our data to think with these theories.

Instead of the traditional qualitative coding of data, three of the co-authors repeatedly read through the empirical material, 'plugging-in' one dimension at a time to think with the data. Our focal question was as follows: How does care manifest as tinkering/affective practices/ethico-political action? By alternating between these perspectives and reading the same data according to multiple theorists (Puig de la Bellacasa, Mol, and Wetherell), we plugged the texts (data and theory) into one another (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013). For example, this plugging-in shifted our focus from merely identifying the agency of nonhumans to witnessing how they reciprocally participate in care relations. To help with this, we created a shared Word document in which all the insights

were gathered and all authors participated in the interpretation of the empirical material and theory. As Jackson and Mazzei (2011, p. 13) describe, we engaged in a "continuous process of making and unmaking" an assemblage of various theories, our empirical material, and our interpretations of them through "arranging, organizing and fitting together". As a result, we conceptualised circular consumption as care through the following three perspectives: care as tinkering, care as affective practices, and care as ethico-political action.

In this section, we elaborate on circular consumption as care, viewing care as tinkering, affective practices, and ethico-political action. The elaboration is based on our goal of thinking with theory and, consequently, the way in which we sensitised ourselves to posthuman feminist theorising of care, made interpretations using it, and the constructed empirical material. Throughout this section, we wish to show how care plays an important role in weaving together the tangled threads of consumption so that more circularity is achieved.

In this article, we have sought to address the question of how circular consumption practices are enacted as matters of care. By adopting a thinking-with-theory approach (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013), we have combined analytical insights derived from posthuman theorising on care (Mol, 2008, 2021; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2017,

2019) with ethnographic materials derived from Finnish frontrunner consumers' circular consumption of food and clothing. The empirical contexts of food and clothing enabled us to show how care is enacted close to the consumer, on our skin and in our bodies. As a result, we have identified three dimensions of care—tinkering, affective practices, and ethico-political action—that highlight how humans and nonhumans become entangled in relations of care within circular consumption practices. Even though it has been argued that we are living in a structurally careless world (Chatzidakis et al., 2020), we have shown that care is still prominent in everyday interactions between consumers and materials, especially for frontrunner consumers. By focusing on them, we have indicated that care invites and cultivates circular consumption in various ways.

Our study contributes to CE literature on circular consumption. First, by examining care in circular consumption, we extend earlier studies on consumer work and circular practices in the CE (Hobson et al., 2021; Korsunova et al., 2022; Rabiu & Jaeger-Erben, 2022, 2024; Sutcliffe, 2022). Our findings highlight how circular consumption practices are interconnected and should be addressed holistically rather than by focusing on isolated practices (see also Greene et al., 2024; Rabiu & Jaeger-Erben, 2022). For example, caring for second-hand clothes may involve a great deal of washing simply to remove unpleasant odours, which may wear out those clothes, potentially resulting in a shorter lifespan. In a similar vein, food waste prevention is closely connected to practices that are not primarily circular, such as taking care of the family or one's health. These interconnections between practices may result in rebound effects and trade-offs between practices (see also Greene et al., 2024; Rabiu & Jaeger-Erben, 2022). Our chosen perspective—circular consumption practices as matters of care—allows us to examine circular practices holistically. The circular practices of frontrunner consumers are thus guided by and coordinated with the care given and received in mutual interactions between humans and nonhumans.

Our findings also highlight, in line with the previous studies, the fact that circular consumption requires constant effort in the form of tinkering, affective practices, or ethico-political action. We have chosen to study frontrunner consumers who already have integrated circular practices into their lives, but even so, they perceive them as laborious and even troublesome. For example, sometimes circular consumption becomes a struggle against unpleasant bodily sensations. At other times, consumers must rely on embodied knowledge to care. This emphasises the situatedness and proximity of caring. Caring is not easy, and it connotes "the acceptance of some form of burden" (Tronto, 1993, p. 103). However, our study also highlights how circular consumption, when enacted as care, invites consumers to engage in concrete doings with materials to extend their lifetimes. The

disposition of care makes the work conducted meaningful. Also, care as tinkering can include constant creative adaptations (see also Korsunova et al., 2022; Molterer et al., 2020; Närvänen et al., 2018), and especially when successful, it is rewarding and can create affectionate relations with materials through affective practices.

Our study has focused on a group of consumers in an affluent society in which finding meaningfulness for this extra, unpaid work is a requirement for its existence (cf. Sutcliffe, 2022). For these types of consumers, meaningfulness relates to sharing private consumption practices publicly as a form of collective effort and ethico-political action. We acknowledge that for consumers in emerging economies, consumer work in CE may entail types of care that are motivated by survival (Korsunova et al., 2022). Thus, we also call for more research on diverse consumer groups. Furthermore, our findings suggest that this 'work' of care is not dependent on human aspirations but, rather, becomes enacted in close relations with nonhumans.

Second, we provide further insights into the ethical and moral aspects of circular consumption. It has been argued that a CE is a moral economy (Gregson et al., 2015). Our findings extend previous studies showing that circular consumption involves ethical considerations (Conduit et al., 2023; Lehtokunnas et al., 2022). Our findings highlight the fact that despite consumers having an internal moral desire (Conduit et al., 2023) or a constituted moral project (Lehtokunnas et al., 2022), the ethics of circular consumption only become tangible, or 'real', when enacted in mundane, situated negotiations of various goods and bads. We offer a nuanced understanding of these negotiations, which take place in specific situations, and we recognise agency beyond humans. Despite their efforts to act ethically, consumers in a CE must form relations with vibrant materials that are constantly changing. As our findings illustrate, materials (e.g. lemons, cream, mould, leather, pill remover, and washing detergent) invite consumers to establish caring relations or, sometimes, resist consumers' efforts to engage in circular consumption practices, thus creating relations with one another that further complicate these practices. Our study thus redefines the ethics of circular consumption as matters of care by shifting the focus away from individual consumer agency.

Third, we bring a sociomaterial perspective to both the circular consumption and ethics of care literatures. Recent conceptualisations of care in consumption have identified multiple stakeholders involved, from individual people to organisations at various levels of society (Chatzidakis & Shaw, 2018; Chatzidakis et al., 2020; Parsons et al., 2021a; Pizzetti et al., 2024). Our findings extend this view by elevating nonhumans to the status of crucial stakeholders in care relations of circular consumption. They are not only targets of care (care receivers) but also caregivers. From

the perspective of CE, materials are seen as having certain lifetimes, and their lives depend on the care given to them during this lifespan. The circular consumption literature has also viewed human actors as active in taking care of materials, for example, as stewards (Conduit et al., 2023), repairers (Godfrey et al., 2022), or workers (Hobson et al., 2021). From another perspective, which we highlight in this article, materials are also taking care of humans by meeting our basic needs, such as food, warmth, safety (see also Waight & Boyer, 2018), and the satisfaction of 'living sustainably'. Consequently, circular consumption is an accomplishment of both human and nonhuman beings in care assemblages. Consumption has been increasingly theorised as involving assemblages (Canniford & Bajde, 2015), for example, family assemblages (Epp et al., 2014) and animate assemblages involving nonhuman animals (Grant et al., 2024). These studies highlight how consumption becomes constituted through multiple, complex, momentary relations between humans and nonhumans. Drawing from Puig de la Bellacasa's (2017) notion of care assemblages, our findings show that care begins in the middle: within webs of consumers, things, and devices, meaning that care is always incomplete, constantly in a state of becoming and having the possibility of becoming interrupted. By empirically examining everyday interactions with nonhumans, we broaden the view of care. It is no longer merely a moral property of individuals but includes mundane, reciprocal sociomaterial actions. Our study is thus the first to bring attention to materials' vibrant, active agency in everyday mundane circular consumption.

Our study has important practical and political implications. The more-than-human ethics of care offers a radically different perspective as compared to the technocentric visions that are prevalent in the CE literature and among practitioners (see also Hobson et al., 2021). Transitioning into a CE is not only about consumers adopting business models and technologies invented at a distance but also mundane work that involves affective ethical considerations. Our chosen care approach redefines consumers' relationships to CE businesses by highlighting how CE-related businesses and services enable care. Many of the existing CE businesses are connected to isolated and context-specific CE practices, such as rescuing leftover food from restaurants or buying second-hand clothes through mobile applications. For these solutions to enable circularity, they require consumer coordination in the form of integrating them with other circular and everyday practices. If businesses focused on holistic care, for example, by offering solutions that would reduce the effort required to juggle everyday circular life, they could facilitate the transition to a CE. However, there is a risk that these marketised care solutions create various inequalities and exploitation effects. Chatzidakis et al. (2024) have recently argued that affective reconnection is needed to complement marketised care in order "to maintain meaningful, emotional

and affective bonds with others" (p. 10). As suggested by these researchers, joint efforts involving various types of actors, such as non-profit organisations and local communities, can help balance marketised care. Examples of this within circular consumption include repair cafés, clothes-swapping events, and community fridges for sharing leftover food in the neighbourhood. Community-based aspects of circular consumption have recently been highlighted (for a review, see Luukkonen et al., 2024), and the role of local communities in adopting and appropriating circular consumption and care should be further examined. Frontrunner consumers may have a significant role to play in establishing these communities and crafting policies that are built from the bottom-up and aligned with their everyday lives. This may result in relevant grassroots innovations for the CE transition (see also Greene et al., 2024). Our study highlights the fact that affective bonds should involve more-than-humans. In the future, CE companies could, for example, enable the tracking of materials or objects that would make the history of the material/object visible for the consumer. Likewise, policymakers could facilitate this shift by supporting these initiatives. The current consumption society is plagued by meaningless consumerism because the constant purchasing of new items no longer creates happiness (Greene et al., 2024). Circular consumption practices as matters of care points in a different direction, one in which meaning can be found in caring for items. The circulation of mundane objects causes emotions and affects to accumulate (Kuruoğlu & Ger, 2015), including material empathy (Godfrey & Price, 2023), impacting the bonds created between consumers and materials/objects in circular consumption. Also, companies and policymakers can nurture these bonds, supporting a cultural and political shift away from consumerism. Inspired by the feminist ethos 'the personal is political', we hope that our study inspires future businesses, policymakers, and other actors to replace convenient, top-down CE solutions with meaningful, bottom-up caring relations.

Our research suggests several pathways for future research. Our study involves frontrunner consumers who are already far along in their journey towards circularity, but we have not focused on how they became frontrunners initially. It will be important to study the contexts, pathways, and biographic experiences leading to someone becoming a frontrunner in circular consumption (see also Greene & Royston, 2022). This is especially important because the role of frontrunners in conducting ethico-political forms of care—inviting also others to care—may be important in the wider appropriation of circular practices. Furthermore, the contexts of food waste and clothing are traditionally perceived as feminine areas of consumption. In other circular consumption contexts, frontrunner consumers may be very different. However, we argue that the framework presented in this article may still be applicable to circular consumption

more broadly. For example, fixing and repairing electronics or using rental and sharing services can be assumed to involve care as tinkering, affective practices, and ethico-political action. The exact nature of these dimensions is, of course, context dependent.

While we have shown that the care assemblages in circular consumption involve a multitude of human and more-than-human creatures and things, our analysis has not focused on nonhuman animals, which feature in care assemblages as well. In other contexts, it has been argued that consumers may enter into relations of mutual becoming with nonhuman animals, such as fly fishers with fish and their natural environment (Grant et al., 2024). Such caring stewardship shares similarities with what we propose regarding non-living materials in circular consumption. Therefore, we invite future research to focus on ‘companion species’ (Haraway, 2008, see also Bettany & Daly, 2008) and ‘animal products’ (Dickstein et al., 2020; Koskinen, 2023b) because nonhuman animals’ relations with humans are (re-)imagined (see also Sayers et al., 2022) and (re-)negotiated through caring relations of circular consumption. Furthermore, our article focused on the consumption domains of food and clothing, and it may be interesting for future research to consider, for example, electronics and furniture as caregivers and care receivers. As consumers, we often have very close relationships with our electronics, such as smartphones, but these are often put in desk drawers to make way for newer ones. We invite researchers to unpack these dynamics of care practices across various domains of circularity. The theoretical and methodological tools adopted in this article also allow more-than-human actors to be considered in research on circular consumption. Additionally, our article sends the message that consumers should have hope in the future because their everyday actions, even the tiniest ones, do matter.

Funding Open access funding provided by Tampere University (including Tampere University Hospital). The research received funding from the Foundation for Economic Education (under Grant Agreement No 190290), the Emil Aaltonen Foundation, and the Horizon Europe funded project CARE: The Circular consumption Activities to Transform households towards material Efficiency (under Grant Agreement No. 101135141). In addition, the third author of this article acknowledges the funding received from the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation.

Conflict of interest The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

Ethical approval All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informal consent Informal consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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