About us

Exploring the potential of circular food systems to feed the world while respecting the planet

In the Circular Food Systems (CiFoS) team we investigate wheter transitioning to a circular food system can provide a solution to many of the environmental and healthy challenges of current food systems.

In a circular food system, we want to produce enough healthy food for the growing world population while taking our planet’s carrying capacity into account. This has many implications, like for instance, avoiding the conversion of more natural ecosystems into agricultural lands, due to the well known negative effects that land use expansion has for the climate and global biodiversity. To achieve this, circular food systems propose to make optimum use of all our biomass. Plant biomass forms the basis in a circular food system, and ideally it should be used primarily to produce human food. We also need to prevent losses throughout the complete chain: by-products from food production, processing and consumption should be reused or recycled into the food system. If we take bread as an example, residues from harvesting are straw and chaff, wheat bran is co-product of flour production, and general waste and human faeces are by-products of consumption. Furthermore, we should make the most efficient use of animals by using them to unlock biomass that is inedible for humans, turning it into valuable food, manure and ecosystem services.

The biophysical concept of circularity: arable land is primarily used for food production; biomass unsuited for direct human consumption is recycled as animal feed; by-products and manure are used to maintain soil fertility. In this way, nutrients are recycled and animals contribute to a circular food system, while sustainably feeding the future population. Source: Van Zanten et al., (2019), Global Food Security.

While the principles of circularity make sense scientifically and are currently trending, we do not really know to what extent a circular food system can reduce the pressure on the Earth’s resources. In other words, the consequences of targeting circularity of materials and substances (biomass, nitrogen, phosphorus) in terms of environmental and socio-economic performance (markets, import and export, food and nutrition security, economic growth) of the food system are still unknown.

The aim of of our team is to develop new pathways towards circular food systems to be able to feed the world, while respecting the planet. This means that we ask critical questions like, “Is over-consumption of meat, for example, a waste because more food is produced than is actually needed?”, or “Do we still have to produce crops that do not directly contribute to our daily nutrient need?”. These questions are currently viewed as being controversial, and the answers depend on many socio-economic aspects. Producing a food system without losses may not be possible, but we can strive to minimise losses and make optimal use of any residual products. We explore many of these questions using and developing the biophysical optimization model CiFoS (click here for more information).

For more information about our work, see our projects and publications.