The entrepreneurial women making the circular economy work

The circular economy is often presented as a grand transformation led by new technology, major investment, and coordinated policy. Our research with twenty six women running micro-businesses in Brazil's beauty sector reveals another story: circularity can emerge through everyday acts of reuse, refill, and local cooperation – even when the systems designed to support it are missing.

Contents:

1. A different view of the circular economy
2. Circularity as something people do
3. The hidden work behind a refill
4. Why the resources 'at hand' are not neutral
5. Gendered circular bricolage
6. What meaningful support would look like
7. Seeing circularity from the ground up

A different view of the circular economy

A circular economy is an economic model designed to eliminate waste and keep products, materials, and resources in use for as long as possible.

When we picture a circular business, we might imagine a large company redesigning products, investing in reverse logistics or introducing a carefully planned refill scheme. This is because large businesses often have the scale and capital to implement highly visible, structural shifts like massive reverse logistics networks or global refill systems

That picture matters, but it is incomplete. It can make circularity look like a strategic choice available to any business with enough ambition¹, but for many small entrepreneurs, the reality is very different.

Small firms commonly face financial, technical, regulatory, and supply-chain barriers to circular business models². Circular action therefore begins not with a transformation programme, but with a practical question: what can I do with the time, materials, money and relationships I have today?

Our study explored that question through in-depth interviews with twenty six women who run micro- and nano-enterprises in the beauty sector in São Paulo, Brazil. Their businesses included beauty salons, aesthetic clinics, cosmetics producers, hair stylists, and nail artists.

We wanted to understand how gendered and institutional conditions shape what circularity means to them – and what circular practices actually emerge in daily work.

Circularity as something people do

Most participants rarely used the language of ‘circular economy’. They spoke instead about concrete activities: cleaning and reusing containers, buying shampoo in bulk and refilling smaller bottles, producing in small batches to avoid surplus, repurposing materials, and asking customers to return packaging.

These were not usually described as formal environmental innovations. They were ordinary responses to cost pressure, limited supply, and the desire not to waste.

“We are circular out of need. We reuse everything because we can't afford to waste.”

That distinction is important. If we look only for businesses that use formal circular-economy labels such as official certifications and information standards that verify that a service meets specific criteria, we risk overlooking a great deal of circular activity. Sustainability may already be embedded in routines, even when the people carrying it out do not present it as a strategy.

The hidden work behind a refill

Some entrepreneurs created informal refill and return systems with their customers. Clients brought bottles back to be cleaned and refilled, sometimes receiving a small discount on their next purchase. Others passed used containers to another local business or saved hair clippings for projects that use hair to help absorb oil spills.

On the surface, these are small actions. Together, however, they perform functions we usually associate with formal infrastructure: collection, reverse logistics, waste reduction, and consumer education. One entrepreneur called her local arrangement; "a kind of micro-recycling right there ourselves".

These practices depended on trust. Customers had to return packaging. Entrepreneurs had to explain unfamiliar approaches and reassure people about quality and hygiene. Local relationships substituted for systems that were absent, inaccessible, or designed for larger firms. The result was circularity built through social ties as much as through materials.

Why the resources 'at hand' are not neutral

Entrepreneurship research uses the term bricolage to describe how people ‘make do’ by recombining the resources at hand³. But that phrase can hide an important question: whose hand can reach which resources?

The women we interviewed did not face material scarcity alone. Many described having their authority questioned by suppliers, customers or partners. Some encountered the assumption that a man must be the real decision-maker. Women who also experienced racial discrimination faced compounded barriers to credibility and opportunity. This reflects wider research showing that entrepreneurial ecosystems and policy narratives are not gender-neutral⁴.

Time was unequally distributed too. Participants spoke about running a company while also carrying responsibility for the home and children. "Sometimes it feels like I have three jobs," one woman told us. The International Labour Organization identifies persistent gaps in care policies as a major obstacle to a more gender-equal world of work⁵ .When sustainability requires extra research, experimentation and coordination, a shortage of discretionary time narrows what is realistically possible.

Information and infrastructure were fragmented. Entrepreneurs had to search for support networks themselves, navigate regulatory complexity, and hunt for suppliers willing to serve small production volumes. Sustainable packaging was often too expensive, while refill-compatible options were hard to find. Even careful waste separation could feel pointless when everything ended up in the same collection truck.

Gendered circular bricolage

We use the term ‘gendered circular bricolage’ to describe what happens under these conditions. It is the socially structured recombination of material, relational, and moral resources to create circular practices within unequal opportunity structures.

In plainer terms, these women are improvising, but they are not improvising on a level playing field.

Their choices are bounded by whether an action is affordable, whether other people regard them as credible, whether suppliers will work at their scale, and whether care responsibilities leave time to experiment.

Their circularity takes three connected forms. It is frugal: materials are reused and production is kept small to control costs. It is relational: refills and returns are coordinated through customers and local contacts. And it is moral: entrepreneurs educate consumers, champion less harmful products and sometimes absorb costs because sustainability matters to them.

This should not be romanticised as proof that scarcity automatically produces innovation. The same ingenuity that generates circular outcomes can conceal an unfair transfer of labour and risk. Entrepreneurs often shoulder the cost of educating customers, finding alternatives, building legitimacy and compensating for missing infrastructure.

What meaningful support would look like

If policy focuses only on large companies and capital-intensive technology, it will miss these distributed, community-embedded forms of circular action. It may also ask the smallest businesses to carry the heaviest burden.

Support for micro-enterprises needs to fit their actual operating conditions. Accessible refill infrastructure, shared reverse-logistics platforms and local networks for affordable sustainable packaging would make circular choices more feasible. Clearer regulatory guidance and supplier matchmaking could reduce the time entrepreneurs spend navigating fragmented systems².

Gender-sensitive support matters as well. Flexible training, peer-learning networks and programmes that recognise care-related time pressure can expand the space available for experimentation. Crucially, support should not focus only on improving individual skills. It must also address the structures that determine who can access capital, information, credibility and time⁶.

Seeing circularity from the ground up

The circular economy is not built only in corporate strategy rooms or high-tech facilities. It is also assembled in salons, clinics and small production spaces: one cleaned bottle, carefully measured batch and trusted customer relationship at a time.

Looking at circularity from the ground up changes what we notice. Practices that appear informal or merely frugal can be environmentally consequential. Women micro-entrepreneurs are not peripheral to the transition; in fragmented systems, they can become local coordinators of circular flows.

But recognition is not enough. If we value the circular work already taking place, we must build institutions that make it easier, more visible, and more fairly shared. Circularity should not depend on how much hidden labour an entrepreneur can absorb. It should be supported as a collective transition – one that takes inequality seriously and widens the range of sustainable action available to everyone⁷.

This project was funded by UKRI–ESRC (project no: APP47103). We gratefully acknowledge the valuable contributions of our collaborators: Dr Vahid Sadeghi of Aston University, and Professors Susana Carla and Vittoria Loviscek of FGV EAESP.

References

¹ Geissdoerfer, M., Savaget, P., Bocken, N. M. P., & Hultink, E. J. (2017). The circular economy—A new sustainability paradigm? Journal of Cleaner Production, 143, 757–768. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.12.048

² Rizos, V., Behrens, A., van der Gaast, W., Hofman, E., Ioannou, A., Kafyeke, T., Flamos, A., Rinaldi, R., Papadelis, S., Hirschnitz-Garbers, M., & Topi, C. (2016). Implementation of circular economy business models by small and medium-sized enterprises: Barriers and enablers. Sustainability, 8(11), Article 1212. https://doi.org/10.3390/su8111212

³ Baker, T., & Nelson, R. E. (2005). Creating something from nothing: Resource construction through entrepreneurial bricolage. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50(3), 329–366. https://doi.org/10.2189/asqu.2005.50.3.329

⁴ Ahl, H., & Marlow, S. (2021). Exploring the false promise of entrepreneurship through a postfeminist critique of the enterprise policy discourse in Sweden and the UK. Human Relations, 74(1), 41–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726719848480

⁵ Addati, L., & Cattaneo, U. (2022). Care at work: Investing in care leave and services for a more gender equal world of work. International Labour Organization. https://doi.org/10.54394/AQOF1491

⁶ OECD/European Commission. (2023). The missing entrepreneurs 2023: Policies for inclusive entrepreneurship and self-employment. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/230efc78-en

⁷ United Nations Environment Programme. (2024). Global waste management outlook 2024: Beyond an age of waste: Turning rubbish into a resource. https://doi.org/10.59117/20.500.11822/44939

Also:

Brush, C. G., Edelman, L. F., Manolova, T. S., & Welter, F. (2019). A gendered look at entrepreneurship ecosystems. Small Business Economics, 53(2), 393–408. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-018-9992-9

de Araujo, A. R., de Almeida Guerra, R. M., Junior, D. L., Kneipp, J. M., & Carvalho, L. M. C. (2026). Circular and sustainable business model innovation: Formulating an integrated concept through a systematic literature review. Circular Economy and Sustainability, 6(2), Article 82. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43615-026-00817-2

Kirchherr, J., Reike, D., & Hekkert, M. (2017). Conceptualizing the circular economy: An analysis of 114 definitions. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 127, 221–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2017.09.005

Sadraei, R., & Dal Mas, F. (2026). Women entrepreneurship in the age of AI and ESG: Micro-and macro-level drivers of adoption. The International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 14657503251408253.

Sadraei, R., & Khorana, S. (2026). Women Entrepreneurs’ Sustainable Internationalization: A Systematic Literature Review of Strategies, Barriers, and Enablers. International Business and Seismic Disruptions, 199-230.

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