Zhang’s Circular Ecologies examines waste not as a residual technical problem, but as a politically generative substance through which urban China’s ecological ambitions become contested, material, and socially uneven. Centred on Guangzhou, the book traces how post-reform growth, consumption, and infrastructural modernisation produced waste as a systemic irritant within China’s technocratic governance, unsettling state imaginaries of seamless circularity and green urban development. Its argument develops through the tension between top-down projects—especially waste-to-energy incineration, recycling campaigns, and circular-economy planning—and the lived practices of residents, informal workers, precarious migrants, activists, objects, and infrastructures through which waste actually circulates. The case synthesis lies in Guangzhou’s transformation from manufacturing hub into aspirational “modern global city”: here, waste management becomes a field where middle-class communities, migrant labourers, environmental advocates, and state actors form unstable alignments around pollution, value, labour, and urban legitimacy. Zhang’s contribution is therefore not merely environmental, but political-anthropological: waste reveals how authoritarian ecological governance can provoke bottom-up forms of action, while also marginalising informal labour and translating material disorder into technoscientific managerial schemes. The conclusion is that circularity is never a closed loop; it is a contested ecology of matter, labour, infrastructure, and power, where the promise of sustainability depends on struggles over who handles waste, who benefits from its recoding as value, and who bears its harms.