While the Circular Economy is widely championed by academics, companies, and politicians, its implementation is still an open issue. Its applications reveal a split between theory and practice. This break makes it difficult to pinpoint how coherent practices are with the original concept and how to understand the purpose of the actions and assess the results’ effectiveness. This is immediate when we consider the complexity of food. This paper aims to provide further insight on the applications and spill over of the circular economy into the food system. Through the systemic analysis of case histories, the research evaluates the effects of 40 circular economy actions in their relationship with Sustainable Development Goals, by assessing how they have been able to integrate and balance the economic, social, and environmentally sustainable development’s dimensions into the food system. What emerges is that food can be a fertile ground for the implementation of a circular economy’s principle and could also provide support in understanding its evolution and adjusting its objectives accordingly. Food is strategic and could be a perfect field for testing a new approach to raw material and waste and for the development of a new context of inquiry, defined as “Circular Economy for Food”.

This article introduces a framework for creating rich augmented environments based on a social web of intelligent things and people. We target outdoor environments, aiming to transform a region into a smart environment that can share its cultural heritage with people, promoting itself and its special qualities. Using the applications developed in the framework, people can interact with things, listen to the stories that these things tell them, and make their own contributions. The things are intelligent in the sense that they aggregate information provided by users and behave in a socially active way. They can autonomously establish social relationships on the basis of their properties and their interaction with users. Hence when a user gets in touch with a thing, she is also introduced to its social network consisting of other things and of users; she can navigate this network to discover and explore the world around the thing itself. Thus the system supports serendipitous navigation in a network of things and people that evolves according to the behavior of users. An innovative interaction model was defined that allows users to interact with objects in a natural, playful way using smartphones without the need for a specially created infrastructure. The framework was instantiated into a suite of applications called WantEat, in which objects from the domain of tourism and gastronomy (such as cheese wheels or bottles of wine) are taken as testimonials of the cultural roots of a region. WantEat includes an application that allows the definition and registration of things, a mobile application that allows users to interact with things, and an application that supports stakeholders in getting feedback about the things that they have registered in the system. WantEat was developed and tested in a real-world context which involved a region and gastronomy-related items from it (such as products, shops, restaurants, and recipes), through an early evaluation with stakeholders and a final evaluation with hundreds of users.

Circular economy for food (CE) and food policies (FP) are two emerging but already prominent research areas, particularly when talking about the cities of the future. This paper analyzes the dynamics between these two fields of research, starting from review articles and the analysis of a case study, underlying the fundaments that FP and CE share. In particular, this paper focuses on using circular economy (CE) indicators and strategies to shape urban food policies (FP) to create a new business and political model towards sustainability. It introduces four converging perspectives, emerging from the literature, and analyzes how they have been integrated in the case study RePoPP (Re-design Project of Organic waste in Porta Palazzo market), a circular project born from the FP of the City of Turin (Italy). RePoPP is indeed a multi-actor project of urban circular food policies against food waste, which demonstrates how a circular approach can be the turning point in the creation of new food policies. This article wants to define for the first time a new research framework called “circular economy for food policy”, along with its characteristics: the application of a systemic approach and CE to problems and solutions, the need for a transdisciplinary and integrated project design for the 9R (responsibility, react, reduce, reuse, re-design, repair, recover, recycle, and rot), the use of food as a pivot of cross-sectoral change, and a new form of collaborative and integrated governance.

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This article proposes a first step in analyzing the integration of the triple bottom line approach to event evaluation and the Big Data produced by event participants to create a circular and participatory monitoring process that utilizes technology to engage all stakeholders (citizens; visitors; producers; tourism organizations; policymakers; associations; and economic, social, and environmental scientists). Using a case study of Slow Food's Terra Madre Salone del Gusto (TMSG) 2016 event, this article examines systemization of a control panel for local decision makers that encourages knowledge management and sharing for learning and sustainable entrepreneurship to create virtuous cycles and solve—through a democratic process—the typical risk of political (mis)interpretation of socioeconomic event impact measurement.