Circular Economy in the Agri-Food Sector: Going Beyond Sustainability - Challenges and consumers' participation

Circular economy is a new approach to the economy-environment pairing that has the potential of a revolution in the history of economic development models. This model is opposed to the traditional production pattern in which resources are extracted, used to produce goods and, eventually, landfilled. Circular economy supports a complete recycling of materials and implies a complete reorganization of production systems in which all steps of value chains are planned in order to use waste as input of new productions. Furthermore, it implies that consumers actively participate for closing the loops. The general objective of this study is the implementation of an assessment of the circular economy applied to agri-food supply chains. It is aimed to generate insights about the challenges that the circular economy will face in the next future. If main constraints for the implementation of the circular economy could be better understood, then this knowledge could be used to better design interventions to create first prototypes of circular supply chains and support initiatives aimed to improve the environmental performances of the agri-food sector. Our results are the outcome of a conceptual process leading to the definition of a set of macro-categories of challenges for the circular economy. Furthermore, we deeply investigated the point of view of consumers and it was possible to identify drivers influencing their participation to a program embedded into a hypothetic agri-food circular supply chain.