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Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) places liability, physical, financial, and/or informative responsibility for a product throughout its life cycle on its producer. Implementing such schemes is expected to result in many environmental and social benefits. Yet, academic and practitioner discussions on the mechanisms focus on environmental impacts, whereas social dimensions of EPR are often side-lined. This short communication contributes to addressing this gap by establishing a research agenda for the justice dimensions of EPR. For this purpose, initial links between EPR and justice – specifically waste colonialism, procedural justice, recognition justice, distributive justice, intra- and intergenerational equity, waste justice, and corrective justice – are set out, including where it affects products in their life cycles and examples of which stakeholders may be impacted, with plastic waste used to provide examples.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact that property rights can have on the implementation of circular waste economies, in which waste is reused, recycled or recovered, within the European Union’s Waste Framework Directive. Design/methodology/approach A theoretical lens is applied to the legal definition as well as production and treatment cycle of waste to understand the property rights that can exist in waste. Findings This paper argues that even though different property rights regimes can apply to waste during its creation, disposal and recovery, the waste management regulatory and legal system is currently predominantly set up to support waste within classic forms of private property ownership. This tends towards commodification and linear systems, which are at odds with an approach that treats waste as a primary wanted resource rather than an unwanted by-product. It is recommended that adopting state or communal property approaches instead could affect systemic transformative change by facilitating the reconceptualisation of waste as a resource for everyone to use. Research limitations/implications The property rights issues are only one dimension of a bigger puzzle. The roles of social conceptualisation, norms, regulations and policies in pursuing circular strategies are only touched upon, but not fully explored in this paper. These provide other avenues that can be underpinned by certain property regimes to transition to circular economies. Originality/value The literature focused on property rights in waste has been very limited to date. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to consider this question in detail from a legal perspective.

In response to constrained resources and a plethora of other environmental issues, there are growing calls to transition to ‘circular economies’ in which resource and waste streams are prevented, reused, recycled or recovered in order to achieve sustainable development. This chapter adopts a case study approach to investigate the alignment between laws and policies promoting circular economy and energy transitions, with a particular focus on how the coordination between these concepts can potentially promote the concept of sustainable energy democracy. The selected case study is a local manifestation of the circular economy in Kalundborg, Denmark. In this case study, energy resources – including steam, natural gas and district heating – are exchanged between industries and other organisations resulting in economic, environmental, and social benefits. The case study observations result in two main contributions: (1) identification of complementary laws and policies for circular economy and energy transitions at national and local levels, and (2) exploration of the links between circular economies and sustainable energy democracy.

The global waste and resource crises necessitate and give great impetus for better and more sustainable management of waste. Increasingly, resource and waste streams that once were sent to landfill or incinerated are now reused, recycled, or recovered. Yet, while many laws and policies have been adopted for this very purpose, a number of recurrent challenges persist across interventions seeking to further facilitate the necessary, widespread transitions to sustainable waste management. This perspective article explores the suitability of blockchain technology in overcoming these challenges. In particular, we discuss the opportunities and challenges for blockchain in (1) offering clarity in property rights of products and wastes, (2) supporting law and policy goals by incentivizing sustainable waste management, and (3) maintaining anonymity and privacy for institutions and individuals.

City-level data are needed to inform local strategies as well as to monitor progress towards the implementation of the New Urban Agenda (NUA). Not only do cities need more data, they also need information that is context sensitive and relevant to local policy needs. This paper reviews over 23 global urban data initiatives, concluding that the global urban data landscape in its current form is unable to support the implementation and monitoring of the NUA. Engaging a broader range of stakeholders in knowledge production is necessary as existing data offer a narrow understanding of the processes at play in cities.

Waste can be conceived as pollution or a resource; pollution in relation to the vast amounts of waste produced that need to be managed, while a resource in that waste can be used as the virgin material in production processes. In both cases, waste is currently most commonly treated as an economic good and thus commodified as a result of approaching the ownership of goods from a Blackstonian absolute dominion perspective. In this paper we present a critique of this classic form of property ownership as it aids linear cradle to grave approaches to waste. In advocating a move towards circular systems for using waste, we propose the adopting of a Lockean conception of property. For this purpose we address three issues: (1) current property rights in waste; (2) alternative approaches to waste; and (3) impacts of applying Locke’s theory. First, we address when an object becomes classified as waste, who owns waste and when ownership changes hands. In discussing the latter, a critique of the classic forms of property ownership that support linear approaches is presented. Secondly, we investigate appropriate property regimes to address these critiques, namely extended producer responsibility and common-pool resource approaches. Finally, the seminal example of industrial symbiosis in Kalundborg, Denmark, is used to provide context for discussions using Locke’s property theory on the feasibility and implications of our property rights discussions and recommendations. Industrial symbiosis is a structure where waste is exchanged between industries within a given network or grouping forming micro-circular economies. In this symbiotic network, waste is thus diverted from landfill and other forms of disposal, thereby lessening the impact of the waste stream on the environment and the economy.