Towards Circular Economy in the Agri-Food Sector. A Systematic Literature Review

Benedetta Esposito,Ornella Malandrino,Maria Rosaria Sessa,Daniela Sica

doi:10.3390/su12187401

Abstract

Over the last decade, the unsustainability of the current economic model, based on the so-called take-make-dispose paradigm, has emerged. In particular, the agro-food sector (AFS) has been severely affected by such problems as resource scarcity and food loss and waste generation along the supply chain. In addition, climate change and biodiversity loss have helped to define an imperative paradigm shift towards a circular economy. Recently, with the publication of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the scientific research examining the adoption of circular economy (CE) models and tools has increased. In this context, the importance of shifting towards a circular economy has become urgent. In this paper, a systematic literature review (SLR) was performed to investigate the state-of-the-art research related to the adoption of circular economy models and tools along the agro-food supply chain. Furthermore, this review highlights that, due to the complexity of the agri-food supply chain, it is almost utopian to define a unique circular economy model for the whole sector. In addition, it emerges that future researches should be concentrated on the integration of different stages of the supply chain with circular economy models and tools in order to create a closed-loop agri-food system.

Highlights

In recent decades, the current economic model based on the take-make-dispose paradigm [1] has been widely criticized for its unsustainability
This paper provides a critical review of the existing literature published on the Scopus and Science Direct and Web of Science databases to answer the following research questions (RQ): RQ1: How does the research analyse the circular economy (CE) as applied to the agro-food sector (AFS)? RQ2: What are the possible scenarios and lines of future research?
Following the previous studies dealing with the systematic literature review (SLR) methodology [3,11,12,13], this paper has been developed through the five-step process (Figure 1) theorized by Denyer and Tranfield

Summary

Introduction

The current economic model based on the take-make-dispose paradigm [1] has been widely criticized for its unsustainability. The agro-food sector (AFS) has been severely affected by problems such as resource scarcity, food loss and waste generation along the world’s supply chain, which, in 2019, totalled approximately 1.3 billion tons annually with a cost of more than 1000 billion dollars per year [4]. Over the past few years, the agro-food system has been paying close attention to cross-cutting issues such as food safety, production traceability, product quality, respect for the environment and human resources. The growing attention paid by policy makers, non-governmental organizations and scholars has prompted agri-food companies to incorporate sustainability into their corporate strategies

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Discussion

Conclusion