• Energy Research

This paper explores the role of Circular Economy (CE) in the hospitality industry, namely in hotels and restaurants. Today’s hospitality consumers have become more ecologically conscious than ever before, and the demand for eco-friendly products and services has grown. This has imposed many hospitality companies into the adoption of Green Practices (GP) and Circular Economy (CE) principles. In particular, CE has been gaining popularity among governments and academia. However, current research shows that CE principles are being mainly discussed and applied in production and manufacturing. The application of CE principles into services, particularly in the hospitality industry, seem to receive little attention. The paper presents the CE concept and discusses it from the perspectives of both companies and consumers and debates the adoption of green practices by the hospitality industry. Our findings indicated that the consumer awareness of sustainable issues has a direct impact on companies’ adoption of CE and GP practices. The paper also identifies that green practices are gaining increased attention in the hospitality industry, and that a wide variety of green practices are already being adopted. However, the role of CE in hospitality industry appears to be uncovered by current research and obscured in green practices. The paper, therefore, identifies a research gap and calls for further investigation in the application of CE in the hospitality industry.

Advancement in packaging technology has played an essential role in reducing food waste and losses; however, most of this technology relies mostly on the use of plastics. Thus, there is an imminent need to think seriously about the transition towards a circular bioeconomy of innovative biobased materials with biodegradability potentials. This paper examines the driving forces behind the changes in food plastic packaging regimes and specifically seeks to understand how socio-technical configurations may influence niches to transition to a circular bioeconomy, particularly biobased biodegradable plastic materials. By employing a systematic review of the literature, we find that coordination with other back-end socio-technical systems that provide valorization of packaging waste is crucial to enable the transition. The literature indicates that one possible transition path is that the biobased biodegradable materials serve as “carriers of food waste”. The paper contributes to the discussion on the dynamics of food packaging in the transition to a bioeconomy viewed through the lenses of a socio-technical system (niche–regime–landscape), which continues to reinforce future actions, leading to better management of packaging end-of-life.