Across the corpus, CE is framed through a managerial vocabulary emphasizing innovation, efficiency, and control. Terms such as ‘modularity,’ ‘decarbonization,’ ‘feedstock flexibility,’ and ‘compliance readiness’ dominate. References to sufficiency or justice are rare; objectives are often reduced to carbon metrics. Some temporal shifts are visible: BASF’s early framing of chemical recycling as an ‘emerging option’ evolves by 2024 into a core strategic pillar; Coca-Cola’s reuse commitments lose prominence, replaced by ‘design for recyclability’ language.

These patterns highlight how CE is primarily framed through efficiency and innovation, with limited attention to sufficiency or justice. Building on these patterns, we interpret how such framings position actors, responsibilities, and pathways within CE discourses.

Our reading shows how CE sub-streams are discursively positioned as solutions that often reinforce incumbency, while the explanatory layer explores how these logics are reproduced or challenged within broader socio-technical dynamics.

While most CE discourses follow a logic of optimization, a few actors signal deeper shifts – weak indicators of deep sustainability potential. Qlar explicitly references Scope 3 emissions, arguing that ‘real circularity must encompass downstream use and end-of-life logistics,’ thereby extending DS2 boundaries beyond operational footprints. Their focus on pre-sorting infrastructure and chain-wide traceability introduces a systems language, though without commitments to DS1 sufficiency or social accountability.

Aurora Kunststoffe builds its model on industrial scrap feedstock, reducing virgin material demand and touching DS1 by prioritizing waste prevention over valorization. Advocacy for third-party audits of recyclate sources adds DS4 governance credibility. Yet, without cross-border policy coherence, CE governance remains skewed to high-income contexts, enabling burden-shifting to weaker jurisdictions (Brooks et al. 2018). Further, high-capital infrastructures such as advanced recycling plants or large-scale waste management facilities may create unintended lock-ins. Once built, these investments require throughput to remain economical, potentially perpetuating disposable plastics by offering downstream outlets, rather than incentivizing upstream reduction and reuse. Addressing DS4 systemically requires international agreements coupling CE aims with environmental justice safeguards.

MKV participates in DIN and EU-level standardization, advocating common recyclability metrics – signaling DS5 leverage-point governance. However, CE can cut two ways: it can stimulate useful innovations in recycling and design, but if pursued narrowly as a technical fix, it risks locking in ever-growing production and rebound consumption. DS requires coupling circularity with sufficiency – using less and using longer – not just improving end-of-life processing (Beuken et al. 2023). High-leverage interventions must shift intent away from throughput growth toward equitable wellbeing, embedding resource caps and sufficiency targets in trade and investment rules (Schröder et al. 2020). Without this, even ambitious CE innovations risk being co-opted into growth trajectories.

On DS3 justice, Röchling discloses a 2.8 % gender pay gap – below national and industry averages – while ALBIS notes internal training for circular transitions, suggesting some organizational reflexivity. Convivial technology approaches – small-scale, modular, and locally adaptable – can align more closely with ecological cycles. For example, the open-source Precious Plastic project offers blueprints for table-top recycling machines, enabling community workshops worldwide to transform local plastic waste into useful products (Kart 2020).

No actor addresses labor conditions, value distribution, or the socio-economic impacts of circular economy technologies in depth.

Yet justice framings remain sparse: No actor addresses labor conditions, value distribution, or the socio-economic impacts of CE technologies in depth. Structural asymmetries persist, with resource extraction and petrochemical production often in the Global South, while high-value manufacturing and profit capture remain in the Global North. Trade in low-value, hard-to-recycle plastics continues to burden countries with limited waste-management capacity (Brooks et al. 2018; Schröder et al. 2020). The UN Global Plastics Treaty negotiations, launched in 2022, represent a pivotal arena for addressing these asymmetries. Delegates from countries such as South Africa and Indonesia have called for binding reduction targets, bans on transboundary waste trade, and financing for reuse infrastructure. This reflects a growing consensus that sustainable plastics governance must be co-produced across regions, not exported as pre-packaged solutions (Dreyer et al. 2024).

Informal recycling sectors – central to material recovery in many low- and middle-income economies – are absent from corporate narratives, despite their exposure to health risks, economic precarity, and exclusion from formal CE governance. Inclusion, where cited, is confined to established partners or consumers in high-income markets, avoiding questions of benefit distribution, cost-bearing, and risk allocation (Velis 2014). From a DS standpoint, embedding DS3 means integrating distributive and procedural justice into CE governance e.g., social safeguards in EPR schemes, fair remuneration and safe conditions for informal recyclers, and enabling Global South–North knowledge exchange on low-impact material use. Without such measures, CE in plastics risks perpetuating inequalities under the banner of circularity.

In sum, the analysis shows that CE discourses in the plastics sector remain dominated by efficiency and innovation narratives, while sufficiency, justice, and leverage-point depth are largely absent. Governance appears strongest in procedural terms, with certification and traceability tools, but lacks binding mechanisms for sufficiency or social inclusion. A few weak signals – Scope 3 integration, gender equity disclosures, and advocacy for standardization – indicate openings for deeper change.

The weak signals identified provide a basis for imagining a circular economy in plastics that genuinely aligns with deep sustainability principles. For such a configuration, we suggest the following:

While DS defines the evaluative grid, CT reminds us that systemic alignment must ultimately be lived in practice: Technologies and infrastructures need to be empowering, equitable, and culturally embedded. This perspective resonates with weak signals such as community-based recycling models, which illustrate how convivial practices can complement DS-aligned governance reforms.

The analysis confirms prior observations in literature that incremental circular economy measures risk stabilizing existing socio-technical regimes rather than transforming them. By scoring CE sub-streams against DS criteria, this study shows that most corporate strategies remain concentrated at the level of optimization – fine-tuning processes without addressing the intent of the system (DS5) or the distribution of benefits and burdens (DS3). These findings align with Bening et al. (2021), who note that design-for-recyclability initiatives often reproduce throughput logics rather than reduce material demand.

The weak signals observed – Scope 3 integration, cross-border governance advocacy, and gender equity disclosure – are rare exceptions. In line with Díaz-García et al. (2015), such openings appear to require both strong internal capabilities (e.g., traceability systems, quality-assurance processes) and external pressures (e.g., regulation, cross-sector collaboration). However, the data also suggest that without explicit sufficiency framing, these openings can be absorbed into business-as-usual trajectories, a phenomenon echoed in Larrain et al. (2020) regarding the framing of chemical recycling.

From a governance perspective, the pattern is consistent with Paletta et al. (2019), who identify persistent gaps in CE governance for plastics packaging, especially around reuse and refill systems. This study’s scoring shows governance (DS4) as the most advanced criterion in current corporate practice. Yet, it remains predominantly procedural – relying on certification and reporting systems – without binding mechanisms to prevent burden-shifting or address informal sector exclusion (Velis 2014).

The DS–CE scoring also illustrates the uneven distribution of innovation attention across sub-streams. Advanced recycling receives the most rhetorical and investment emphasis, in part because it aligns with existing petrochemical infrastructures and investor expectations. This mirrors findings that chemical recycling is often positioned as a technological silver bullet, overshadowing sufficiency-based innovations such as reuse systems or polymer demand caps (Schultz and Reinhardt 2023).

Integrating sufficiency (DS1) into innovation trajectories requires rebalancing R&D priorities toward system redesign rather than throughput recovery. This entails shifting from ‘parameter optimization’ to ‘design- and intent-level’ interventions (Abson et al. 2017), an orientation that is absent in current CE strategies for plastics. This is where the TA community can play a decisive role: By evaluating not only the technical feasibility of innovations but also their systemic alignment with DS criteria, but by highlighting trade-offs between efficiency gains and justice outcomes.

Positioning CE within a deep sustainability frame demands more than scaling existing optimization strategies. It requires governance innovations capable of addressing both material and social dimensions, as emphasized in prior TA scholarship (Grunwald 2019; Martin 2022). For industry, this entails rethinking innovation trajectories: Rather than framing CE purely as a driver of market competitiveness, firms need to embed sufficiency and justice in core business models. For policy, it means coupling CE legislation to enforceable social safeguards, especially in transboundary contexts where governance vacuums permit environmental and social externalization (Brooks et al. 2018; Velis 2014).

TA’s task is to develop orientation knowledge that identifies leverage points where interventions can shift systemic intent. This includes anticipating rebound effects from efficiency-led CE strategies, evaluating justice outcomes alongside technical performance, and fostering transdisciplinary processes that include marginalized stakeholders in agenda-setting.

The findings underline the necessity of embedding distributive and procedural justice considerations into CE assessment frameworks from the outset. This means co-developing indicators with stakeholders beyond high-income markets, integrating informal sector voices into scenario-building, and systematically assessing the transboundary implications of CE policies (Grunwald 2019). Deep sustainability requires that TA expands its remit beyond impact prediction to shaping the normative orientation of innovation systems.

Such an agenda responds to the call of coupling TA with the social-ecological dimensions of sustainability transitions. In the plastics sector, this could mean comparative evaluations of CE pathways under different governance regimes, life-cycle modelling that includes social indicators, and field-based investigations into the justice impacts of supply chain restructuring. By making justice, sufficiency, and leverage depth explicit assessment criteria, TA can help steer the CE discourse away from incrementalism and toward genuinely transformative outcomes.