User circularity practices: Adopting a user stewardship perspective for a circular economy

Humanity is depleting the planet’s natural resources at an unsustainable rate. The pursuit of a circular economy is a strong, viable means of reversing this trend; however, it will require users to take responsibility for the proper application and protection of resources for future generations. While the daily practices of users play a significant role in enabling a circular economy, this role has largely been overlooked in current literature. Our research synthesizes knowledge from the circular economy and marketing literatures, and draws on stewardship theory to better understand the user’s role in the circular economy. Specifically, we introduce a resource stewardship framework from a user perspective. This framework specifies a set of user circularity practices to minimize the extraction of finite resources, while conserving and regenerating resources already in circulation for future use. These practices occur at various stages in the resource life cycle and include minimizing the sourcing and use of finite resources, (re)designing products and services to use less resources, and optimizing the value potential from resources through extending their life cycle and recovering resources for future use. With this framework, we redefine the role of users as resource stewards and advance the rather narrow and fragmented considerations of user contributions to the circular economy, laying the foundation for more caring and responsible users and a future research agenda.