Emma works on all things circular economy and food at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, serving as the project Lead on the Food initiative. Emma and her team bring together major industry players from across the food value chain, along with city municipalities, to take a systemic approach to unlocking the positive potential of the food system. She grew up in Toronto, Canada, and gained experiences in business management consulting, environmental conservation, designing cities for people, organic farming, and social entrepreneurship prior to joining the Foundation. Apart from food, Emma’s loves include: solo adventures, creating art, and exploring her home base of the Isle of Wight, England.
Ethan is a farmer at High Falls Farm and the Chief Innovation Officer at HowGood.com, where he manages the world’s largest food sustainability database (127 impact attributes across 33,000 unique ingredients and 1,000,000+ products). His research for Fortune 100 retail and CPG companies combines on-the-ground agricultural expertise with sustainability-driven market insights. Ethan is the author of Regenerative Agriculture, Regenerative Enterprise, and the monthly Regeneration Newsroom; you can read his latest articles on agriculture, business, and life at ethansoloviev.com.
Head of Agriculture, Food and Beverage at the World Economic Forum. Responsible for agriculture, food, and beverage community and programs, with initiatives on nutrition, food circularity, food and health, packaging circularity, bio-innovation, and connecting consumers to action on climate change. Expertise in public-private partnerships, frontier markets, supply chains, economic growth, and governance. Translates complex issues into practical strategy and actionable initiatives. Previously: Built strategy and partnerships to grow social and environmental compliance across Walmart’s global supply chain, and developed first comprehensive responsibility strategy for Walmart’s $135 billion international retail unit. Served as Senior Policy Advisor to two heads of agency at the U.S. Agency for International Development; and developed an advisory board for the Board of Directors at Mars, Incorporated. Worked to start-up a partnership-focused U.S. Government international development entity – the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and strengthened domestic and international policy for NASA. Served as a founder, corporate officer and board member for various multi-stakeholder collaborative initiatives on human rights and environmental issues.
While the industrialization of agriculture has enabled us to produce more food at lower prices than ever before, the system is based on an extractive model that depletes natural resources, pollutes the environment, and generates an unprecedented volume of waste. The mounting pressures created by resource scarcity, population growth, and environmental volatility related to climate change has led food businesses, policymakers, academics, and NGOs to become increasingly interested in transitioning toward a more circular food system.
Food is lagging when it comes to the adoption of the Circular Economy. There’s a lack of awareness. We all just assume that since food is safe for consumption, it’s okay for the planet. But that's not really the case. There are no examples of truly circular products in food. What we see as so called circular is the redirection of waste streams and side streams into new products, reducing the harm. Though this is desperately needed as we need to reduce the harm, it doesn’t address the underlying systemic flaws, it doesn’t do any good, by design.
If you really want to become circular in food, you need to have circular food by design, which means that the food should be produced and designed in such a way that has a positive social and ecological impact and it can cycle as a part of the biological nutrient cycle. To be circular is to aim for eco-effectiveness, not eco efficiency, just like any complex adaptive system, including nature."
FOOD PRODUCTION Everything involved in producing the raw food materials – whether farming, fishing, gathering, or extractive processes. (Example: Raising a cow on pasture and by feeding grain in a barn. Or planting and tending blueberry bushes, then harvesting the blueberries.) SUPPLY CHAIN Occurs throughout the process, often between each phase. Includes the processes and impacts of transportation and storage between locations of physical production and transformation. (Example: Shipping the cow to a slaughterhouse. Or packaging and shipping the fresh blueberries to a processing plant.) PROCESSING Initial transformation of raw food materials for further use in products. (Example: Butchering an animal. Or freeze-drying blueberries.) CONVERSION & MANUFACTURING Secondary transformation of processed food materials into final products. (Example: Slicing, spicing, and drying butchered meat to make jerky. Or mixing & roasting dried blueberries with dried wheat, oats, and honey to make muesli.) PACKAGING Packaging the finished product for sale. Includes effects of packaging materials and methods utilized. (Example: Packing the finished jerky in an air-tight plastic bag with oxygen-absorbing packet. Or filling a wax-coated paper bag with the muesli.) RETAILING The processes and energy used to warehouse, shelve, and in some way deliver to a customer the packaged product. Could include refrigeration. Note that Supply Chain impacts often come into play significantly here, as they do between each of the phases.(Example: The jerky and muesli sit on a shelf in a grocery store, which uses energy to light, clean, and HVAC the building. Or the jerky and muesli sit in a warehouse, are purchased through e-retail, and then shipped by parcel carrier (or drone;) to a consumer. PREPARING & EATING The processes and energy used to prepare and eat the food product at a consumer’s home or other place where they eat. (Example: Consumer stores jerky in a refrigerator (though they don’t need to), then opens the package and eats the contents. Or consumer boils water to make a porridge out of the muesli.) POST-USE What happens to the food product after it is consumed – is it put in the trash? Composted in the backyard? Sent to a municipal biodigestion facility?
Peter Hopkinson
Exeter Centre for Circularity
University of Exeter
You need partners across the entire food system. You need collaboration with farmers; collaboration with traders and companies aggregating commodities of agricultural materials in collaboration with other suppliers like packaging suppliers; you need collaboration with governments because you need the right policies in place; you need collaboration with NGOs and universities; everybody has to act together.
In a traditional food growing system, it begins with farmers—you’re not going to get a regenerative system without them—then governments and regulatory bodies, in terms of subsidies, taxation, incentives, disincentives, regulatory barriers. And what’s the role of the consumer in all this? We’ve spent half a century educating the end consumer in a specific way. Are we now looking to re-educate or educate them in a different way? Technologists might not be regarded as relevant to food, but there’s AI, the Internet of things, packaging and packaging technologies, and systems integrators working on logistics and supply chains. It’s a multiplicity of stakeholders: farmers, technologists, government supply chain integrators, food manufacturers, and food retailers. Then in the urban context, you’ve got a whole other set of people, the waste recovery reprocessing groups. Each context will be slightly different, and the value chain reconfiguration will vary from product category to product category, and sector by sector, country by country, each with their own history and legacy systems."
Among the challenges in shifting towards a circular food system is that there exists no universally accepted definition of the circular economy of food, and differing opinions about how the concept relates to longer-established paradigms like sustainability. While most stakeholders agree that designing out waste, soil restoration, and nutrient cycling are critical elements of the circular economy of food, some experts contend that the concept also encompasses social justice and other human values; that circularity can be thought of as a model to ultimately empower all people to realize their full potential.
Food production has always been impacted by unpredictable external factors. Weather events like droughts, floods, early freezes, hail, and heavy rain; pests and blights; shifts in demand due to population changes and economic volatility have had often devastating effects on food systems. Technology has significantly reduced uncertainty; we have weather forecasting, techniques to boost crop resilience, and tools to accurately predict supply and demand. The system has become more interwoven and therefore the impact of external pressures, like droughts, have been amplified. As a result, the continued rise in commodity volatility pressures on the food system in recent decades remain, and in some ways have become more challenging.
Among the greatest pressure is resource scarcity; water, nutrients, soil, and farmland are all required by our agricultural system, but are in many cases becoming increasingly degraded or limited. Intensification and specialization have made our food systems and farms more efficient but less resilient, and more prone to shock. Hence, the impact of external factors is amplified. Torrential downpours that lead to nutrient run off on degraded soil are an example. The food system is also strained by climate change, which is shifting weather patterns, increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, and in many cases exacerbating resource scarcity. Meanwhile, global population growth will require our food system to feed more people than ever before.
These challenging conditions illustrate the value in thoughtfully designing effective, regenerative systems that eliminate the concept of waste and are resilient to external shocks. Because ultimately, the question isn’t whether these pressures will persist—it’s how effectively our systems can respond through resilient design.
The number one challenge facing the circular economy of food is that we can’t even define it; we don’t know what it is, and the definition will be different for almost everybody.
The big advantage of the circular economy is that it encourages people who haven’t been thinking about these things to get started. It’s catchy, but we don’t necessarily need a circular economy; fundamentally what we need is a sustainable food system. If we can achieve a sustainable food system with low waste at every point in the chain and producing the most nutritious foods with the lowest environmental impact, the system doesn’t actually need to be circular."
A circular economy is about closing material and energy loops. It’s the idea that we can reuse things, from the whole product to component materi- als by basically breaking apart the nonlinear system of consumption and production. We can extract raw materials through processing, manufacturing, distribution, and the use phase—where consumers have a product service in hand and use it. Then we have the end of life, which could be disposal or reuse, maybe recycling."
You can also think about a circular economy on a more macro level. When you talk about the entire supply chain, you close the loop. For example, the byproduct of a manufacturing process can become the input for a different manufacturing process. For example, you can use food waste as the input to generate electricity, or to produce compost or to make clothing fibers. Here, the food waste becomes the input to a new process. You’re basically closing loops at a smaller scale. You can do it on the macro scale or you can do it on the micro scale; both would apply."
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