In the modern industrial economy, households in Norway conveniently channel their waste through the public or private waste-management systems. The circular economy places new responsibilities and requirements on consumers and households and seems to require an increase in unwaged labour on their part, related to tasks such as repairing and sharing, as well as sorting, cleaning, storing and transporting the waste to recycling stations or civic amenities. This largely conceptual chapter presents this post-consumption work done by households as a central but largely overlooked aspect of the transition towards a more circular society. Households and their activities are embedded in an institutional context, and here an institutional perspective is applied with the Marxist ‘metabolic rift’ concept to consider some institutional elements that influence the household’s role in rebalancing the energy and resource flows between rural and urban areas in the context of recycling and urban mining.