Circularity Without Redistribution? North–South Inequality in Recycled Aluminum Value Chains

The transition towards sustainable aluminum manufacturing is commonly assessed through recycling rates, energy savings, and resource efficiency, but its distributive effects across global value chains remain insufficiently examined. This study evaluates whether recycled aluminum value chains contribute to both circularity and north–south redistribution, or whether they reproduce unequal patterns of value capture, industrial upgrading, employment quality, and trade dependency. The analysis combines UN Comtrade trade data for HS 7601–7616, OECD ICIO 2025 value added indicators, ILOSTAT labor statistics, and UN SDG data for the 2018–2020 three-year average. Eighty economies are classified into four groups: advanced industrial economies, emerging industrial economies, lower-middle-income economies, and low-income economies. A composite indicator linked to SDGs 8, 9, 10, and 12, with SDG 17 incorporated only as a trade dependency context, is constructed from normalized industrial, circular material flow, distributive, and job-quality variables. The results show a clear north–south hierarchy: advanced economies concentrate a larger share of exports in aluminum manufactures, while low-income economies remain more dependent on scrap flows. Group A captures most chain value added, whereas Groups C and D retain only marginal shares. Labor productivity falls sharply from advanced to low-income economies, while working poverty increases substantially. By contrast, circularity scores vary less strongly across groups, suggesting that participation in circular material flows does not necessarily imply equitable industrial upgrading. This study shows that circularity in recycled aluminum value chains does not automatically generate redistribution and provides a replicable framework for distinguishing material circularity from distributive justice.