When circularity gains diverge from social-equity outcomes: A justice-oriented agent-based scenario-comparison model with an Amsterdam case study

This study develops a justice-oriented agent-based model (ABM) to examine how everyday circular-economy (CE) practices, spatial access to CE infrastructure and labor-market assumptions jointly shape distributive urban outcomes. Using Amsterdam as an illustrative case, the model represents household sorting, bulky-item drop-off and repair behavior under uneven access to sorting containers, recycling centers, repair cafés and waste-burden locations. Four CE policy scenarios are compared through replicated simulations, plausibility checks and extended sensitivity screening. The results show that CE-active scenarios generate circular activity relative to the Linear reference, while mean local CE activation and flow-based citywide CE throughput do not always follow the same pattern. Under the model's assumed negative reduced-form CE–unemployment coupling, CE-active scenarios also produce lower simulated unemployment. This conditional result reflects the specified labor-market mechanism and does not imply that CE policies generally cause unemployment to fall. Spatial-advantage inequality is higher in CE-active scenarios when scenario-specific opportunity activation interacts with uneven access and burden layers, while accumulated-resource inequality does not automatically decline under stronger CE support. The main contribution is a transparent scenario-analysis testbed that connects household heterogeneity, spatial opportunity, behavioral mechanisms and distributional consequences, helping to explore when aggregate circularity gains may diverge from justice-oriented urban outcomes.