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Circular food systems entail that the food is produced regeneratively and, where appropriate, locally. Food and packaging waste are designed out entirely, while healthy, low-impact diets are promoted and easy to access. 

[Circle Economy](https://www.circle-economy.com/) is a not-for-profit organisation working to accelerate the circular transition. Through the *Circularity Gap Reporting Initiative*, our mission is to deliver an annual global Circularity Metric that measures the state of the world economy and identifies key levers to transition to global circularity. With nature as our guide, we work alongside cross-sector stakeholders from academia, businesses, NGOs and governments to provide a powerful combination of practical and scalable interventions that transform circular opportunities into realities. 

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Circular Food

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Limes and lemons - Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

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Starter Kit collection

Business case

Impact on the health and happiness of human populations

Well-being

Reduced green house gas emissions released into the biosphere

Reduce Emissions (SDG13)

Minimise waste through diversion: Instead of sending waste to landfill, it is redirected into other industrial processes for handling, treatment, recycling, recovery, or reuse in various forms. 

Minimise waste through design: At the outset of a process of project, plan and design such that there is zero waste or minimal waste during production, use, and at end of life. 

Minimise Waste (SDG12)

Reduced use and withdrawal of water and rate of recycling and reuse of water

Save Water (SDG6)

Processing and producing food and beverages for consumption

Food and Beverage

Utilise waste streams as a source of secondary resources and recover waste for reuse and recycling

Use waste as a resource

Reuse, repurpose, and recycle waste streams within other industries

Valorise waste streams - open loop

Transforming waste products, materials for reuse within other industries

Open loop upcycling

Do better with less by using and supporting infrastructure, processes and products that are designed to minimize material, water and energy use and waste generation from production to end of use


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Reduce

Put enablers in place that allow circular businessesto grow, thrive and innovate (e.g. incubators, start-up funding, partnerships, innovation deals, business capacity building and testing groundsfor new business models).


Support circular and resource-efficient business innovations

The food system nourishes populations and employs 50% of the global workforce, but:
- it currently drives a quarter of the overshoot on the climate change planetary boundary due to its greenhouse gas (GHG) production, 
- animal farming alone uses over one-quarter of all land, equivalent to the size of the Americas,
- nearly a quarter of freshwater resources are lost due to rampant food waste, and
- it is the single largest driver of biodiversity loss.

A circular food system must address the whole value chain, from production to consumption to waste management. The four key solutions for the food system are:
- Put healthier, satiating foods first: Prioritise satiating and healthy foods with a lower environmental impact—ideally shifting calories from meat, fish, and dairy towards cereals, fruits, vegetables, and nuts.
- Go local, seasonal, and organic: Prioritise the production and consumption of local, seasonal, and organic produce (sometimes in combination with GMO to reduce pests and disease loss on crops), which can lead to a significantly reduced need for chemical inputs, fuels, and processing services that contribute to environmental impacts.
- Mainstream regenerative agriculture: Scale up agricultural practices that regenerate ecosystems, recirculate nutrients and sequester carbon by design. 
- End avoidable food waste: Minimise food loss and valorise waste following the food waste hierarchy along the supply chain and at the consumer level through better management of transport and storage, more refrigeration and smart planning, and technology at the consumer and food service levels.



🍏 Food Systems

Businesses

Businesses support the innovation and implementation of circular strategies. Yet innovations and startups that close loops and facilitate reuse often face additional challenges, due to the lack of infrastructure that supports circular initiatives for example physical and digital infrastructure to support reverse logistics.

Sustainable business ecosystems connect circular businesses around common problems and provide coordinated support, education and financing opportunities for these businesses to operate and scale together. This solution stimulates the local economy, which can promote local circular job opportunities in the future, and provides an attractive and supportive environment for more circular businesses to start up and scale the city.

The local government may partner with innovation ecosystems and circular domain experts to create training modules and facilitation programmes for small businesses, making knowledge resources available to small businesses looking to go circular. Local governments may also provide financial support - either directly or in partnership with financial institutions - to target and stimulate ecosystems around specific circular business models. 


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🍏  Sustainable food and agriculture business ecosystems

Cycle strategies aim to cycle and reuse materials at their highest value: they maximise the volume of secondary materials re-entering the economy, ultimately minimising the need for virgin material inputs and therefore also narrowing flows. Of course, virgin materials will always be needed to a degree: all materials degrade and can’t be cycled infinitely, use energy, and require blending with virgin materials to maintain strength and functionality.

Cycle

Impacts

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Industries

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The principles of a circular economy concern designing out waste, regenerating ecosystems and keeping items in use. Decoupling the economy from material flows—improving the rate of resource productivity faster than the economic growth rate—is also a consistent guide. By evolving with the growing number of applications of circular economy principles, and consolidating these strategies across thematic areas, Circle Economy’s Key Elements Framework (KE) renders the elements of the circular economy salient and serves as a basis to derive contextual strategies and interventions. 


The Framework consists of:
- Core Elements: Activities directly handling product or material flows; and uniquely,
- Enabling Elements: those that remove obstacles for core actors.


Key elements of the circular economy

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Circle Economy's framework of strategies and activities that define the circular economy

The Circular City Actions Framework provides urban changemakers with five complementary strategies they can use to start working towards a more circular system. 

The framework is action-based to provide users with concrete strategic directions and showcase the desired outcomes of each strategy. 
The framework consists of five complementary **strategies**, under which **sub-strategies** provide further detail. Finally, each sub-strategy consists of a diversity of tangible **solutions** which are framed in relation to key thematic areas. 

Note: solutions are currently focused on:
- 🍏 **Food systems**
- 🏢  **Built environment**
- 👕📱  **Consumer goods**
- ⚡ **Energy Systems**
- 🚌 **Mobility Systems**
- 💧 **Water Systems**

More thematic areas are coming soon...

'Click through each of the five strategy cards below to explore the framework and circular economy case studies in more depth!'



This framework was developed in collaboration with ICLEI, Metabolic and Ellen MacArthur Foundation with support from the MAVA Foundation. Read more about it [here]( https://circulars.iclei.org/action-framework/). 



Circular City Actions Framework

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An action-based framework for local governments working towards circular cities

Thematic Areas

City Stakeholders

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Based on the work of [Bocken et al. (2016)](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309699661_Product_design_and_business_model_strategies_for_a_circular_economy), the Four Flows Framework serves as a simple framework for managing resource flows in a circular economy by using less (Narrow), using for longer (Slow), using again (Cycle), and using clean, regenerative materials and energy (Regenerate).

These different principles of circular economy can be applied to our socioeconomic metabolism: we can design stocks like buildings, infrastructure, machinery, and vehicles to be rich resource mines for the future, and design manufactured goods and consumables to be cycled and made regenerative. Furthermore, the focus must also centre on getting more value out of fewer materials. Achieving the aims of a circular economy—minimising material use, regenerating the Earth, and preventing material losses—can be done through these four key strategies mentioned above.

Source: Circle Economy. (2023). *[The circularity gap report 2023](https://www.circularity-gap.world/2023)* (p.22). Amsterdam: Circle Economy. 

Four Flows Framework

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  Inside: Loop Juice and how this amazing company is reducing food waste by saving the fruit and vegetable outcasts.Did you know that almost half of fruits and vegetables that are grown around the world end up in the dumpster?You may be thinking, it’s because they’ve gone bad, lost nutrients or they’re deemed unsafe for consumption. But, the reality is that those perfectly nutritious and healthy foods are being thrown away because they either:have a weird shape, color or look,due to issues with stock management, ANDbecause they simply don’t adhere to what’s deemed ‘normal’Meet Loop Mission, an amazing Montreal-based company that’s giving hope to all fruits and veggies by repurposing the outcasts.How you may be wondering?By turning them into delicious and refreshing cold-pressed juices. And that’s not all, to close the loop they give all the leftover pulp that’s high in fiber and nutrients to a company that turns it into fabulous dog treats.Enough said, we are in LOVE and we just had to sit down with CEO & Co-Founder Julie Poitras-Saulnier to learn more about this amazing mission, what we can do to help reduce food waste as well as some exciting stuff to look forward to.INSIDE LOOP JUICE“Nobody likes to be rejected, not even food.”1) One of our main goals over the past couple of years has been to reduce food waste. That’s why we were very excited to come across your company. And, if it were any other juice company we would have easily walked by, but as you say LOOP is so much more than a juice company, please can you tell us a little bit more LOOP’s story and what inspired it? LOOP is not a juice company, it’s a circular economy company that creates value out of waste. We save fruits and vegetables that are normally rejected by the food industry and transform them into awesome cold-pressed juices. We also reuse our own waste, which is a lot of fiber, to create vegan dog treats.The idea came 2 years ago when Frederic Monette from Courchesne Larose, a major fruits and vegetable distributor, contacted David Cote and I, looking for ways to reduce waste in their company. Every day, they threw away 16 tons of produce, a reality shared by every player in the industry. Most of these fruits and vegetables were still very good for consumption, but were discarded because of their shape, size, color or just because they did’t have a long enough shelf life to survive the entire cycle of distribution that usually takes 2 to 3 weeks. So we’ve decided to do something about it, and we created LOOP 🙂  2) Our name says it all, at Naughty Nutrition we don’t like to place restrictions on eating, we rather focus on finding the healthiest version of the foods we love and creating balance in our lifestyles. At Loop Mission, what would you say your motto is?Our main mission is to develop partnerships with other businesses to transform trash into treasure. For our model to work, we need to connect businesses together, we can’t do it on our own. Our second mission is to make quality clean label products more accessible, thanks to our business model!3) How much food and vegetable waste is there in Canada and the world?One third of the food produced in the world for human consumption is wasted, which amounts to 1.3 billion tons per year. For fruits and vegetables, it’s even worse, with 45% of fruits and vegetables being wasted. For only apples in Canada, we throw away 1,225,000 every single day. More data on food waste here.4) In your opinion, what can each one of us do to reduce food waste at home? A very large part of the food that is being wasted occurs at home (almost 50% of all waste), so every consumer can really contribute to solving this issue. And it’s also a way of saving a lot of money! Here are a few tips:Store produce properly to increase shelf life.Shop for groceries more often and buy only what you need.Be creative (replace ingredients in a recipe with what you have available).Eat the entire thing: there are tons of very good recipes online on how to transform carrot leaves into pesto for example.You can get more tips on reducing food waste at home here.  5) Could you tell us a little bit more about the entire process, where do you source the fruits/vegetables and how are they processed into the delicious juice blends?Our main partner is Courchesne Larose, a fruit and vegetable distributor. Most of our produce comes from them, but since they’re also working with many farmers, we have also developed relationships with some of them. We recently started working with Sobeys to repurpose their warehouse overflow into raw protein smoothies.6) Our favourite loop juice is the High Achiever and we also love Beach Bum. Which one is your favourite? What about your best seller?My favorite is also the High Achiever! I’m a real beet lover and it is very beety, but it’s actually not one of our best sellers. The most popular is the Morning Glory, which is our only juice that has only fruits (no veggies!). It’s more of a classic: clementine, orange and strawberries. It’s almost impossible not to love it. We even keep the strawberry leaves in it, as they’re super good for consumption, full of benefits and another way to reduce food waste.  7) Do you have a refreshing cocktail recipe that you can share with us?We have a lot of those! A really good one is:1 ½ oz of Gin2 oz of Beach Bum6 oz of KombuchaDash of lime JuiceIceBasil LeavesSimply mix and enjoy!8) Give us the scoop, are you planning to release any new products or blends? What is your ultimate goal?We actually have many new products coming with the same closed-loop concept! 🙂We’re launching a line of sour beer made of day-old bread mixed with perfectly imperfect fruit juice. Every day in Canada, we throw away 750,000 breads, and most of it is still very good for consumption, so we’ve decided to brew it. Basically, bread is grains, and beer is fermented grains so it’s super easy.9) And finally, where can our readers find your juices?Our juices are available across Canada in many health food stores, café and bakeries. In Ontario, they’re also available at Longo’s, Healthy Planet, Organic Garage, Fiesta Farm, Sweet Potato. For a full list of our point of sale, people can go on our website (http://loopmission.com/loop-locator/), write their postal code and find the closest store that carries our products.Photo credit: @spehricity     


LOOP repurposes the outcasts of the food industry.LOOP is a circular economy project created by like-minded dreamers sharing a common goal: to put an end to food waste. It’s pretty simple: we give value back to rejected food by transforming it into awesome products.In Canada, 56% of the food is thrown away. Not necessarily because it’s not good for consumption anymore, but mostly due to stock management issues and our pickiness, as consumers, on how our food should look.
As of today, we’ve collectively had this environmental impact:5 126TONS of Fruits & Vegetables rescued4 138TONS of Greenhouse Gas Emissions avoided397 803 262LITERS of Water saved1 414 953SLICES of Bread rescued
CONTACT
 

Canada

Toronto

Ontario

Québec

Montreal

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LOOP Mission

<p>LOOP is a circular economy company that creates value out of waste.&nbsp;LOOP collects imperfect fruits and vegetables that are normally rejected by the food industry and transform them into cold-pressed juices and alcoholic beverages. </p>