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As governments encourage circular economy (CE) initiatives, markets for waste recirculation are taking shape. But implementation is in its infancy and material circuits are emergent. Early food waste CEs shaped by commercial players emphasise capital investment, routinised forms of waged labour, processing sites distant from food waste sources, and transactional relationships. Less well understood is the potential for vernacular circularity beyond market-based, transactional frames. This paper reports from a collaborative research exercise with a non-profit community farm in nonmetropolitan Australia, seeking to connect with cafés to access food waste for composting. Cafés are a nexus of production and consumption, ubiquitous in the contemporary multicultural Australian context, and therefore ideal for grassroots CEs. Ten local cafes participated, reviewing existing food waste practices, motivations for circularity, and contextual factors including the regional setting. We found that food waste circularity emerges via divergent pathways related to enterprise type and scale, environmental values of actors, place embeddedness, and local relationships. These pathways reflect the place-based attributes and diverse sustainability values of residents and businesses in the coastal, industrial city of Wollongong, where the study is based. Contrasting distant, transactional circuits, are more-than-transactional food waste pathways, developed by microscale actors shaping vernacular material flows and "hacking" public provision of Food Organic and Garden Organic (FOGO) waste services to mobilise environmental values and community relationships. Overlooked by "big policy" more-than-transactional relationships bind producers, intermediaries and consumers in closer loops and, in so doing, enrich place and facilitate an ethic of care for soil and land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human encounters with waste can trigger reflections on taken-for-granted assumptions about consumption. Taking this observation as its starting point, this paper explores whether and how the introduction of the kitchen caddy and food waste composting at the municipal scale generates new environmental subjectivities in Australian homes. Using visceral research methods, the paper shows that, other than participation in municipal composting, close encounters with food becoming compost do not trigger more experimental or sustainable relationships with food. Rather, they trigger new configurations of cleanliness, tidiness and storage as participants seek to stabilise their home against the disruptive sight, smell and touch of food becoming compost. In unsettling the boundaries between humans and nonhumans, and cleanliness and chaos, food becoming compost produces visceral disgust among residents who are primed through modern home cultures to maintain cleanliness, control and the prevention of nonhuman intrusions at home. The success of municipal composting thus hinges on households' commitment to 'sustainability work' in placing, storing, cleaning and sealing food to reconfigure the modern home for waste recovery. Reconceptualising municipal composting as a co-production of sensory engagement and household practices, we centre a visceral politics of household sustainability at the heart of municipal composting and resource management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]