PRIORITIZING CIRCULAR STRATEGIES IN THE AGRI-FOOD SECTOR: A MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION MAKING (MCDM) APPROACH

There is growing consensus on the need of a gradual transition to a more sustainable economic growth. Global warming, pollution and the rapid absorption of natural resources require swift and immediate action to limit and reverse their impact on the environment. The circular economy (CE), when incorporated into various business models across a variety of sectors and at different levels, represents a straightforward approach to overcoming these global challenges (Hornain, 2021; United Nations, 2019). A growing interest in CE can be highlighted in the EU policy looking for developing guidelines to support CE strategies on the national level. Since 2015, the European Commission has launched a Circular Economy Action Plan (European Commission, 2015) to stimulate Europe’s transition towards a more circular economy, to boost global competitiveness and to foster sustainable economic growth. The application of CE principles in the agri-food sector appears to be an important and necessary change to transform society and face future challenges (European Commission, 2021). The increasing global food demand, in fact, is forcing operators and policy makers to identify effective new strategies for production, distribution, and consumption (Accorsi et al., 2019). Beyond the attempts of measuring the firm’s performance circularity, what is lacking is an approach that can assess the circularity status in a holistic vision, considering the complexity and disruption of all circular economy principles. Literature shows that advanced research and data availability on CE assessment tools and indicators are lacking (Rocchi et al., 2021; Elia et al., 2017). In this context, a step-by-step approach has been used to select a customized set of indicators capable of accurately assessing the level of CE in agrifood sector both at macro, meso and micro level. This has made it possible to prioritize the circular economy strategies proposed in the literature and based on four orientations: Operations, Product and. Services, Culture and Organization and Ecosystem. The research design is composed of four stages. In the first stage, through the analysis of the literature, a theoretical model which provides a holistic vision of the circular economy has been implemented and adapted to agri-food sector. In the second stage, a set of indicators capable of measuring each sub- criterion has been collected. In third stage, a weight is assigned to each indicator using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is a pairwise comparison methodology. Lastly, a geometric Multi Criteria Decision Method (MCDM), called Axial Distance-based Aggregated Measurement (ADAM) model is used to normalize, assess, and aggregate the results and produce final scores for the different alternatives to be ranked based on their final circularity scores. The results showed that the "circular and organization" orientation is the one with the best score in terms of circularity. This emphasizes the importance of considering the circular economy part of the corporate organizational strategy and not to relegate it to the sustainability of processes. The company that sets long-term circularity goals manages to be a circular organization over time. Initiatives in this area aim to develop time targets to support the circular vision and mobilize the necessary resources that can help business units prioritize and implement circular initiatives. Recognizing that established internal ways of doing business are likely to impede circular decision-making and at speed and be a barrier for further uptake, it is important to make the circular economy a central element in the ways of working and in the structure of the company, by incorporating the circularity in policies, processes, and procedures. The framework implemented in this study could be useful tool to understand the extent to which companies are implementing circular business models across different dimensions, and thus where they are still lacking, allowing to guide environmental policies.