Circular Economy Disclosure by Agri-Food Companies

Circular economy (CE) is a model adopted by companies aimed at reducing, reusing, recycling resources and reducing consumption . In their review of 114 CE definitions, Kirchherr et al. (2017) found that the recurrent components are: reduce, reuse and recycle, followed by recover (4R dimensions). Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) (2015) provided the most used CE definition, intended as an industrial system that aims to regenerate. In detail, CE favours the value maximization in each part of the product‘s life and the achievement of closed-loop resource flow, changing waste into resource and increasing the resource use efficiency. This study responds to this call for research by investigating the CE information released by all agri-food Italian listed companies after the implementation of SDGs and Directive 2014/95/EU, in order to understand how companies incorporate CE in their business models to achieve sustainability. To achieve this aim, we content analysed the sustainability reports drawn up according to Directive 2014/95/EU.