Participating and Labouring in Circular Transitions: The Case of Community Food Rescue/Redistribution Initiatives in Singapore

Abstract

With some exceptions, the nexus between diverse ecologies of participation and unwaged labour in circular transitions has not been fully investigated. Additionally, while research on labour and the circular economy has begun to acknowledge the informal unpaid work that is indispensable to closing circularity loops in the household and community, its relational aspects are still discounted in the literature. We seek to address these gaps through our case study on emerging community food rescue/redistribution initiatives in Singapore. Increasingly, these initiatives are gaining success in garnering volunteer labour involving care/relational work through their diverse models of engagement, which cater to a range of preferences. We offer a perspective suggesting that volunteers are often able to find rich regimes of value in the work that they do despite being unpaid. Future research can perhaps explore the ethics of exploiting one’s care for the environment and community in order to extract this unwaged labour.

1. Introduction: Labouring in Food Rescue/Redistribution

Given that a circular economy is a labour-intensive enterprise, an explication of the kinds of labour needed to sustain it is timely. The shift towards a circular economy has gained currency as a means of addressing environmental crises such as waste production and resource depletion. A circular economic model can be operationalised vis à vis a range of circular R-behaviours (e.g., reduce, reuse, repair) that help with closing energy/material circularity loops. Circularity loops are closed when waste (outputs) is transformed into resources (inputs). In attending to the case study of food rescue/redistribution in Singapore, this paper seeks to expound on the links between diverse forms of participation in food waste recovery and the various kinds of volunteer labour it enlists. With some exceptions [1], the nexus between ecologies of participation and unwaged labour in circular transitions has not been fully investigated. Additionally, even though research on labour and the circular economy has started to examine the informal unpaid work that is invested into closing circularity loops in the household and community, its relational aspects (i.e., [digital] relational labour) have still been discounted in the literature. These are the gaps that this paper hopes to address.

Although unwaged waste work tends to be stigmatised or trivialised, we observe that food rescue/redistribution initiatives have managed to draw a sizeable volume of volunteer labour to their cause in recent years, through various channels. We posit that conceptual perspectives on diverse ecologies of participation and forms of labour can help to better unpack this phenomenon. The rest of the paper is organised into five parts. Section 2 briefly outlines the conceptual underpinnings of diverse ecologies of participation in sustainability transitions. Section 3 appraises the literature on labour and the circular economy in order to highlight a nascent acknowledgement of unwaged waste work in sustaining circular transitions and to identify a research gap in unpaid (digital) relational labour. Section 4 demonstrates how ideas on diverse ecologies of participation intersect with different kinds of unwaged labour, and how these can be applied to a case study on food rescue/redistribution activities in Singapore. Section 5 concludes with questions on the ethical implications of mobilising unpaid labour for circular food transitions.

2. Diverse Ecologies of Participation

Scholars working on socio-technical sustainability transitions are increasingly attending to diverse, interconnected forms of participation. Turning the analytical gaze to participation is an attempt to bring back the social in socio-technical shifts, which have been dominated by technocentric and market-based policies/instruments [2]. An overwhelming reliance on top-down technocratic interventions risks obscuring the roles that other actors/stakeholders can play in sustainability transitions and disengaging the public. It has been argued that citizen-led public/civic engagement is crucial in communicating environmental problems/crises, achieving ‘buy in’ for policies, promoting pro-environmental action and cultivating a deliberative system for imagining collective futures [3]. Participatory processes help to ensure that citizens are not just passive recipients of policies but are meaningfully involved in sustainability transitions [4].

Participation in a range of sustainability transitions (e.g., circular/zero-waste, low carbon) has been conceptualised as mutually co-productive and emergent [5,6]. The notion of ‘diverse ecologies of participation’ has been mobilised to comprehend multiple engagement models and the relational dynamics of various participatory collectives, including their interactions with broader spaces, structures and cultures [3]. Ecologies/models of participation can be diverse based on how they enrol human/non-human participants, and orchestrate their procedural formats and their deliverables [6]. Examples include collectives that stage public demonstrations through protest, activism, and art/performance-based activities. Additionally, a relational view of participation foregrounds the ways in which participatory practices are embedded in socio-relational and virtual/technological networks, as well as connected to broader systems of public/democratic engagement [3]. Despite its attunement to social relationalities, the scholarship on diverse ecologies of participation has been silent on the kinds of labour, especially volunteer labour that sustain bottom-up participatory collectives and drive sustainability transitions (for exceptions, see [1]).

3. Labour in Circular Transitions

Research on the labour–circularity nexus has converged on the ramifications that a circular economy can have on employment rates [7,8,9]. Supra-national organisations (e.g., the European Union) and governments have been quick to highlight the new jobs that a circular economy can create for the general public, usually without qualifying if these jobs are well-paid. The premise is that circular economic activities (e.g., repair) are labour-intensive precisely because they are not entirely based on the production of goods, which are material-intensive [9]. Such a prioritisation of waged, formal and productive labour is also a reflection of what policy makers (in the Global North) are primarily concerned about. In any case, Laubinger et al. [8] have pointed out that there is still not enough (big) data to make definitive conclusions about its effects on overall employment.

Some jobs necessary for a smooth transition towards a circular economy include collection/reverse-logistics firms that allow for the reintroduction of end-of-life products into the market, sustainable design [10], component remanufacturing, refurbishment/repair and re-commerce platforms that facilitate product-life extension [8,9,11,12]. Llorente-González and Vence’s [9] investigation on the repair, reuse and recycling industry in the European Union affirms the circular economy’s positive impact on employment rates but surmises that these jobs are not well remunerated (compared to the European average).

What is increasingly clear is that a circular transition will also subsist on unpaid labour at the scale of the household and community [13]. At the household scale, researchers are studying consumption work in light of R-behaviours that close circularity loops [14,15], such as recycling [16] and repair [4]. According to Wheeler and Glucksmann [17], consumption work entails the sourcing, selection, purchase, repair, and (re)use of consumer products, including their divestment (e.g., resell, recycle), among other practices [15,17]. They aver that circular consumption work tends to be highly gendered, as the handling of domestic waste and caring for household objects—what feminists call reproductive labour—falls proportionately on the shoulders of women [17,18].

Similarly, community-oriented consumption work, such as those involving repair, reuse and composting are unwaged and gendered. Van der Velden [19] examines locally organised networks that connect mostly female volunteers who repair/mend garments and male volunteers who repair household objects with individuals who need such services. It has been reported that community thrift shops promoting reuse [20] and community composting [21] are mostly run by female volunteers. For Morrow and Davies [21], such community-led efforts at closing circularity loops blur the lines between productive and reproductive labour while mobilising environmental care work beyond the household. They argue that this unpaid caring labour is largely performed by women and is frequently underacknowledged because of its gendered dimension. Consequently, they are calling for producers to bear the costs of this unpaid labour through extended producer-responsibility programmes [13].

Informal unpaid labour in circular consumption work drives circularity loops. As such, consumption work implicates economically unproductive (unwaged) that is essential and valuable. Until recently, consumption work has not been perceived as a legitimate form of work. Instead, it has been reduced to ‘consumer behaviour’, or as an obligatory act of caring for the environment. Critical/feminist scholars have critiqued such a dismissal of caring about and for ‘waste’ as both physical and affective labour [20]. Even though care is often underscored by a caring relation, the relational labour that is bound up in circular consumption work or R-behaviours has been elided in the literature.

3.1. Relational Labour

While it is acknowledged that businesses in circular economies will entail more social interactions alongside an increase in the number of touch points over a product’s lifetime [11], researchers addressing the labour and circular economy nexus have neglected how circular R-behaviours are driven by relational labour. As an exception, Pusz et al. [22] highlight the relational dimensions of a circular economy in the context of social enterprises and the strength of their ties with others depending on the frequency of interactions, depth of engagement and the extent to which they are reciprocal. They observe that the prevalence of weak ties could be due to resource constraints (e.g., lack of time) and the lack of relational capacities. Nevertheless, they contend that weak ties can still be valuable sources of information that can aid in diffusing circular ideas or seed new ways of closing circularity loops.

Additionally, Kashyap et al. [4], p. 175 put forth the notion of ‘relational repair’ in espousing a circular transition undergirded by an ethics of care. This draws on de la Bellacasa’s [23], p. 198 point, that “to care about something, or for somebody, is inevitably to create relation”. Beyond repairing things to extend their lifespan, relational repair hopes for a circular transition that is committed to repairing the broader socio-ecological fabric. On top of encouraging human connection through repair clinics/workshops, relational repair is also about situating individuals in “their immediate ecological relations”, alongside non-human life [4]. Whereas the relational elements of repair have been foregrounded, little attention has been paid to the unpaid relational labour in sustaining community-initiated food rescue/redistribution.

Taking Zelizer’s [24] theory of relational work and Baym’s [25] conceptualisation of relational labour as points of departure, academics have documented the ways in which networking and the negotiation of social relationships are frequently a necessary but not explicitly stated part of a job scope [26,27]. They have also shown how relational labour is often taken for granted and goes unpaid [28]. For Zelizer [24], p. 146, relational work entails “establish[ing] a set of distinctive understandings that operate within [a social] boundary”, including the designation of appropriate transactions. Meanwhile, Baym [25], p. 20 understands relational labour as the “communicative practices and skills” needed to forge and maintain ongoing interpersonal relationships. In particular, relational labour gestures at the blurring of personal and professional relationships, leisure and work time, clients and community [27].

Denegri-Knott et al. [28] note that relational labour that is wrought into digital interactions and the creation of content on social media as well as other online platforms are not usually remunerated but generate profits for these platforms. In particular, social media platforms, for instance, invite ubiquitous connections/communication that must be consistently worked upon. This ties into the next subsection on digital labour.

3.2. Digital Labour

Academics have written extensively about employing digital technologies to catalyse circular business innovation, bolster sustainable product management, and enhance organisational performance, among others [29,30,31]. Since a circular economic model is dependent on distribution as well as access, digitalisation is pertinent in enabling/tracing the transactions and logistical needs among actors, across value chains [11]. Nonetheless, the digital labour required to support this digitalisation has largely been overlooked. The term digital labour emerged in the early 2000s when academics were trying to account for unpaid user activity on social media [32]. It has now been broadened to include compensated and uncompensated work that creates value and is mediated through digital/mobile technologies [33]. Uncompensated labour that users themselves may not even perceive as ‘work’, includes uploading photos of food for sharing onto a freecycling app and leisurely scrolling through the listings on it.

Some scholars have just begun to investigate the digital labour that supports ethical food consumption (e.g., consuming rescued food) and digital food activism and facilitates circular food systems on digital media platforms [33,34]. One of the ways in which digital food activism or ‘apptivism’ [29] works to reduce food waste is by connecting food rescuers with people/organisations having excess/unsold/expired food, and individuals who have extra (rescued) food to share with recipients. For Ciulli et al. [35], p. 300, connecting people with excess/unsold/expired food and people who want them closes circularity loops by filling up what they call “circularity holes”. Circularity holes are broken links or gaps in supply chain actors (i.e., those with food to give away, and those who wish to receive food), which hinder the recovery of food waste. Digital platforms function as “circularity brokers” [35], p. 300, or intermediaries between “supply chain actors” [35], p. 299. Furthermore, Ciulli et al. [35] contend that this mode of digital brokerage affords a larger network of connections compared to traditional means.

Digital food activism is animated by the labour of ‘digital prosumption’ [36] a neologism that combines production and consumption in the context of consumer/user-generated content online. Schneider and Eli [33] contend that prosumption and activism count as digital labour based on unpaid data generation from user participation on digital platforms. According to Pulignano et al. [37], free or unpaid labour is a major characteristic of digital (media) platforms. Likewise, Ritzer and Jurgenson [33], p. 13 note that in “prosumer capitalism, control and exploitation take on a different character than in the other forms of capitalism: there is a trend toward unpaid rather than paid labour”.

Having reviewed the bodies of work relevant to this paper, the following section turns to our case study on Singapore’s food rescue/redistribution landscape. Our case study seeks to flesh out the ways in which ideas on diverse ecologies of participation and unpaid labour in the circular economy can be applied to an empirical context.

4. Our Case Study: Singapore’s Food Rescue/Redistribution Landscape

Singapore’s food rescue/redistribution landscape has evolved over time. The rescue of still edible but unsold/discarded food from wholesale markets and curb-side garbage bins (i.e., dumpster diving or waste picking) started off at the fringes of society in Singapore. While food rescue, including the sharing of and requesting for rescued food are not mainstream practices, they have become more common of late [38]. An increasing number of volunteers have also been enrolled in food recovery activities. Food rescue groups still salvage food from bins but the request for unsold/unsellable food from retailers/distributors directly has become common. Volunteers affiliated with food rescue groups such as Divert to Second Life (D2L, see Figure 1), Food Rescue Sengkang (see Figure 2) and Sg Food Rescue (primarily vegetables/fruits) typically collect unsold/expired food from retailers/distributors before redistributing them to members of the public.

Labouring in circular food transitions, specifically in terms of how food rescue and redistribution have managed to gain momentum in Singapore, can be better apprehended through what Chilvers and Longhurst [6] term diverse ecologies of participation [1]. Ecologies of (public/civic) participation foreground the links among participating subjects/stakeholders/collectives, spaces of participation and their broader context/systems [3]. We posit that the diversity of community-initiated food rescue/redistribution activities has contributed to its growth. This diversity is manifested in (i) the kinds of actors/stakeholders/organisations that are being engaged; (ii) the models of engagement; and (iii) the kinds of roles that volunteers can play.

Food rescue/redistribution activities have enlisted support from a range of actors/stakeholders such as distributors/retailers, private donors, facility/venue providers, state-affiliated organisations, food-related social enterprises, smartphone applications and food rescue collectives, among others. These activities are orchestrated vis à vis multiple models of engagement like companies keen on volunteering stints as part of their corporate social responsibility, state-subsidised social enterprises striving to reduce food waste (e.g., Mono SG), app-based food redistribution (e.g., GoodHood, OLIO), food rescue collectives with satellite distribution points at void decks (see Figure 3 on Food Rescue Sengkang), strategic partnerships between food rescue groups and state-affiliated organisations as well as between food rescue groups and freecycling apps (see following paragraphs). Regardless of the engagement model in question, food rescue initiatives are labour-intensive/extensive endeavours that typically subsist on uncompensated labour. The non-exhaustive roles that volunteers can play in such initiatives include liaising with retailers and collecting food from them, being drivers who transport food in bulk as well as redistributing food. In general, diversity in the models of engagement and the roles that individuals can play in food rescue/redistribution encourages participation by appealing to a wide range of preferences.

One particular model of participatory engagement that has proliferated in the last few years involves the state’s co-optation and/or replication of community-led food rescue/redistribution practices. Food waste is one of the city state’s major waste streams, and the recovery of food waste is aligned with Singapore’s Zero Waste Masterplan (2019) and the Singapore Green Plan 2030 [39]. The appropriation of food rescue/redistribution activities by state-related agencies as well as collaborations between food rescue collectives and these agencies have allowed food rescue/redistribution to scale up and become more established. Food rescue/redistribution can then ride on the state’s pre-existing physical infrastructure and digital networks, including Community Centres and Residential Networks under the auspices of the People’s Association (a state agency) for the temporary storage and redistribution of rescued food (see Figure 4 and Figure 5). Residential Networks are also making concessions for community fridges to be placed at the void decks of public housing flats. Community Centres and Residential Networks also capitalise on their digital (social media) networks with a relatively large following and webpages for marketing events and recruiting volunteers (see Figure 6). Elsewhere, we have evinced that in land-scarce Singapore, the endorsement of and support for waste reduction initiatives by state-related agencies just by providing a space/venue can be instructive [40,41].

Besides the efficacy of leveraging the Community Centres’ digital networks, food rescue/redistribution has managed to recruit a critical mass of volunteers, perhaps because they are often able to find value in their involvement, such as in accruing monetary savings from obtaining free food. More crucially, volunteers are responding to what Food Rescue Sengkang perceives as an urgent, rousing call to “feed the people, not the bins” (See https://www.foodrescuesk.com/ accessed on 26 March 2025). In other words, food rescue/recirculation tends to be couched as collective care work (i.e., caring for the environment and the community as ‘waste warriors’ and ‘food waste heros’, see Figure 6 and Figure 7) and is bound up in a moral economy. In this case, food rescue/redistribution denotes a significant shift from a top-down rational-technological to a ground-up community participatory approach in waste reduction which gives weight to the relational (including caring relations) [1,42] in closing food circularity loops. This emphasis on decentralised food rescue/redistribution on the scale of the community also relates to the significance of shortening circularity loops. According to Reike et al. [43], shortening circulatory loops involves keeping products close to their original form, function and end consumers. In the context of food rescue, this implies rescuing food for consumption before composting it, and rescuing/redistributing food within one’s neighbourhood. On top of reducing food miles and carbon emissions, geographical proximity aids in the quick transfer of perishable food before it goes bad in Singapore’s tropical heat, thereby allowing for maximum value retention). This implies that the labour needed for food rescue/redistribution is frequently urgent and time-sensitive.

Accordingly, food rescue/redistribution involves relational (caring) labour as it establishes social contact/interaction with various actors. It also reflects one’s care for food waste and the community, even if the encounter between the giver and recipient of food is fleeting and transactional. Relational labour is also reflected in building relations with potential donors and in educating recipients about food safety that is not entirely tied to best-before or expiry dates, among other examples. Another taken-for-granted mode of digital relational labour is woven into technologically mediated engagements in food waste activism/‘apptivism’ [29,34]. Although the organisational logistics of redistributing (rescued) food is afforded by smartphone applications, app users will still have to perform digital relational labour, for instance, by taking pictures of and listing the food for giving away, checking for messages as well as liaising with potential recipients on when/where the food can be collected.

As mentioned earlier, smartphone applications are circularity brokers that provide information on what kinds of food are available and where while linking givers (or prosumers whose homes serve as distribution points for rescued food) to recipients. On top of partnerships with Community Centres (see Figure 4), D2L has collaborated with GoodHood, a local freecycling app which aims to revitalise a kampong (or community) spirit in Singapore’s residential estates (see Figure 8). D2L members are required to perform a substantial amount of digital relational labour as they are supposed to share 90 percent of the food that they have rescued from retailers with their neighbours by listing them on the application. Likewise, OLIO is another freecycling app that has a tie-up with Panda Mart to redistribute left-over food (see Figure 7). GoodHood and OLIO encourage place-based networks and listings can be filtered based on one’s geographical location.

The labour that enables the recovery of food waste may be uncompensated but is far from being unproductive. Food rescue/redistribution activities and circular consumption work that involves unsold/unsellable/excess/expired food into valued waste (see [44]). Consumption work involving rescued food may entail R-behaviours such as the refusal of and reduction in store-bought food because they are ranked higher on a waste management hierarchy. Put another way, waste work need not be a waste of time/effort, especially when volunteers are themselves transformed by enacting ethics of care in recuperating food waste (see [45]). Notably, Singapore will have to move away from a narrow valorisation on economically productive work, as the realisation of a circular economy hinges on unwaged/volunteer labour.

5. Conclusions and Future Research Directions

As Berry [20], p. 27 puts it, “waste [implicates] a series of relationships—between people, between things—characterised by power and privilege as well as care and community”. Overall, this paper draws on ‘diverse ecologies of participation’ in order to foreground the informal, unpaid labour foundational to community participation in circular (food) economies. In particular, our case study on food rescue/redistribution in Singapore sheds light on the intersecting connections and kinds of (physical, relational and digital) labour that animate circular food transitions. Such an orientation towards the energy embodied in human labour also serves as a corrective to a predominant emphasis on energy conservation and waste-to-energy recovery in circular systems.

Additionally, our case study posits that for circular food transitions to gain traction, “multiple models of public involvement” [3], p. 201 or civic engagements that interconnect are important in serving as potential sources of volunteer labour. Meanwhile, labour must first be put into conveying the rich regimes of value that food rescue/redistribution can engender (e.g., cultivating meaningful relationships, and contributing to an environmental cause) before it can reap unpaid labour. At the same time, mindset shifts that depart from the devaluation of waste work as unproductive can be helpful.

If uncompensated labour is key to sustaining a circular economy, then questions need to be asked about a socially sustainable and just transition, with the possibility of compensating unremunerated community waste work fairly in kind (more than just 10 percent of the food that rescuers can keep for themselves, see Figure 8). These are questions about who bears the disproportionate cost of unwaged waste work beyond the household and the ethics of exploiting one’s care for the environment and community in order to extract this labour. Future research can perhaps examine how this volunteer labour can be better distributed, supported, validated and accounted for.