Spiraling out in the Circular Economy: Movement and Belonging at a Malaysian Rare Earth Elements Refinery

Abstract The rise of “circular economy” discourse in the extractive industries has altered how researchers, laborers, activists, and consumers conceptualize movements of materials. To proponents, building a circular economy around rare earth elements (REE) production will “close the loop” around extraction, processing, design, manufacturing, and disposal practices to minimize and eventually eliminate all “waste” produced through technology development. Articulated through utopian imaginaries projecting environmental and technological futures far beyond mining, however, these conceptualizations of movement also carry far-ranging entailments for the movements of specific groups of people, including their place in future social and political orders and their capacity to plan for multi-generational futures. This article follows activists and university researchers brought into conflict through a REE processing facility in Malaysia, where research on commercial applications for post-processing wastes has been treated alternately as pathways to economic diversification and as threats to minoritized communities’ welfare and senses of national belonging. Both groups correlate “responsible” waste management to mismanaged flows of people: prospective experts drawn overseas for more sophisticated work; children emigrating for university education or middle-class jobs after struggling to find positions in Malaysia. While explicitly offering future stability and a broadened ethics of responsible attention, the visions of circularity undergirding these debates effectively collapse the many forms of movement at stake in industrial transition into a promise of transcendence, obscuring the racialized patterns of exclusion and migration that invariably accompany the extractive industries.