More-than-transactional circular economies: the café-urban farm nexus and emergent regional food waste circuits

ABSTRACT

As governments encourage circular economy (CE) initiatives, markets for waste recirculation are taking shape. But implementation is in its infancy and material circuits are emergent. Early food waste CEs shaped by commercial players emphasise capital investment, routinised forms of waged labour, processing sites distant from food waste sources, and transactional relationships. Less well understood is the potential for vernacular circularity beyond market-based, transactional frames. This paper reports from a collaborative research exercise with a non-profit community farm in nonmetropolitan Australia, seeking to connect with cafés to access food waste for composting. Cafés are a nexus of production and consumption, ubiquitous in the contemporary multicultural Australian context, and therefore ideal for grassroots CEs. Ten local cafes participated, reviewing existing food waste practices, motivations for circularity, and contextual factors including the regional setting. We found that food waste circularity emerges via divergent pathways related to enterprise type and scale, environmental values of actors, place embeddedness, and local relationships. These pathways reflect the place-based attributes and diverse sustainability values of residents and businesses in the coastal, industrial city of Wollongong, where the study is based. Contrasting distant, transactional circuits, are more-than-transactional food waste pathways, developed by microscale actors shaping vernacular material flows and “hacking” public provision of Food Organic and Garden Organic (FOGO) waste services to mobilise environmental values and community relationships. Overlooked by “big policy” more-than-transactional relationships bind producers, intermediaries and consumers in closer loops and, in so doing, enrich place and facilitate an ethic of care for soil and land.

KEYWORDS:

• Circular economy
• cafe
• food waste
• community
• sustainability
• Australia

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the time and generosity of participants in this study in sharing their experiences and perceptions. Special thanks to Callum Champagne, at Green Connect who provided support and advice in the formulation of research reported in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s ).

Notes

1 The Social is part of the Merrigong Theatre Company, Delano Café is owned by Delano Speciality Coffee; Diggies Café and Kiosk is owned by the larger Diggies Group and The Glass Alley leases its premises from the owners of Wollongong Central shopping centre (50/50 owned by Haben Property Fund and JY Group).

2 For Delano Café, antecedent to food waste repurposing was an earlier transition from single-use plastics and take-away coffee in response to public concerns.