Lessons from English pre-industrial times for a post-industrial circular economy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper takes an interdisciplinary qualitative approach to repair, re-use and recycling. Collaboration between academics in the fields of economic sociology, sustainable production and consumption and medieval history permits a long-term perspective on the incentives and deterrents for sustainable practices in relation to resource flows. In England in the period 1250–1500 acquisition of raw materials and production processes were labour intensive, resources were scarce and production and consumption were not strictly separated. However, a dynamic manufacturing sector and rising consumer incomes meant that new goods were readily available. Three options were available for practising circularity of items: prolonging use to avoid immediate disposal, passing on the item (as a gift or through sale) or re-processing it through recycling. Textiles, metal working, butchery, tanning and leatherworking were the industries in which such practices were most common. Repair and re-use was promoted in the domestic environment, including by the church. In a commercial context, however, trade organisations and government implemented legal deterrents that protected consumers but also limited competition for the producers of new goods. Analysis of these practices enables us to draw three lessons for the current move towards a circular economy. Firstly, efforts need to be made to revive the practice of repair in the household. Secondly, education and greater transparency can prevent quality-control rules from limiting the scope of the circular economy by prioritising new goods. Finally, attention should be paid both the financial and emotional motivations that can encourage sustainable practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".