This article studies the ongoing reorganisation of waste repurposing policies in France through the emerging concept of circular economy as an institutional framework. For public authorities, closing the loops of material consumption requires rethinking material circulation in order to allow a decoupling between resource use and economic growth. However, the European and national legal frameworks are deeply marked by the lobbying of big industrial companies which tend to present themselves as privileged solutions, hence excluding alternative views and practices at different levels. I question this situation by drawing on the debate around what some authors qualify as a ‘post-political condition’. I show how the institutional framework favours large industrial companies and I study the consequences of those choices on the mainstream and alternative waste repurposing practices in Lyon’s urban area.