Agricultural waste management and valorisation in the context of the circular bioeconomy: Exploring the potential of biomass value webs

In this article, we discuss relocating the topic of waste management in the wider issue of circular bioeconomy, with a special focus on the emerging concept of value webs. We do so by reviewing the literature on biomass value webs. Based on this, we discuss the potential role of this conceptual development for food waste management. The main result of the review is that the concept of value webs, though theoretically very interesting, has actually found little application to waste and by-products until now. In spite of this, it may be expected that the concept will expand to this area in the future. This will require advances in terms of data and attention to circularity, but also a better economic conceptualisation allowing more rigorous quantitative applications in support of policy decisions.