The concept of a circular economy is at a crossroads. To date, it has been largely driven by top-down national or trans-national legislation such as EU Circular Economy Package or Chinese Circular Economy Promotion. Bottom-up or grassroots engagement has been minimal and innovation has been largely restricted to use of 3R or 4R frameworks to reduce, reuse, recycle materials and products or recover waste as energy. Greater implementation of a circular economy needs a paradigm shift in public attitudes coupled with greater innovation that moves from 3R to 9R framework. Building on the insights gained from the successful transition of two Scandinavian cities of Växjö and Sønderborg to becoming fossil fuel-free economies, the article explores use of natural language processing tools to create shared narratives and stories from large format public engagement that expresses common interests, values and priorities that in turn can contribute to a participatory design of a circular economy. The article uses published data from Christchurch ‘Share an Idea’ as a case study.