Circular economy and reducing consumption from a decolonial approach

Abstract

Reflection paper, which from the decolonial perspective, understood as the detachment of the westerners’ epistemologies, raises the alternative proposal of the Circular Economy (CE) and reducing consumption, in which compensation is claimed for the environmental damage generated by consumerism and the exploitation of natural resources in the past 30 years. The CE assumes the cyclical structure of nature, to generate a model for the use of ecosystem resources and to bring industrial production to the bare minimum by including the reuse of inputs that, due to their characteristics, should not return to the environment. The methodology used consisted of a conceptual review based on 30 documents published between 1990 and 2020. For the bibliographic search, academic databases were used. In addition, for the co-occurrence relationships by semantic link, the BibExcel software was used and, for the visualization of semantic communities, the Gephi program. It is concluded that strategies must be designed to strengthen the alternative proposal to reduce consumption, within the framework of globalized markets embedded in the guidelines of a circular economy.