“…Limited consumer interest and acceptance may be a major stumbling block to the progress of a circular bio-economy [300,332]. Generating awareness among, disseminating information to, seeking consent and acceptance from and respecting the opinions of all the stakeholders, social groups and competent authorities involved, is of paramount importance, as Kokkinos et al After all, a circular bio-economy is a political (inter-governmental), industrial and societal initiative, necessitating, inter alia: & instillation of a flexible and encouraging organisational change culture in the value chains [211,225] & stronger private-public partnerships [323] & innovative approaches in addition to 'technology-push' traditional R&D or a piecemeal approach to different technologies [323] & willingness to establish bio-based industries to attain self-sufficiency in essential commodities (as exemplified for bio-nutraceuticals in Italy [268]) & collaborations between 'conventional and non-conventional entities' in the economy [322] among various disciplines in academic and industrial research [288] & rural recapitalisation and integration of marginalised communities [226] & robust institutional structures at local and regional levels [363] & systems thinking at all levels [364,365] & strong governance, an effective policy mix, appropriate legal framework conditions and innovative approaches [227,340,366] & a revamp of quality standards to accommodate recycled bio-products [166] & changes in entire systems through the joint efforts of researchers, technology centres, industries, the primary sector, new entrepreneurs, consumers, civil society and governments [140,291,324,325,330] & reimagination of cities which house over 50% of the global population, are centres of direct and indirect consumption of resources and are often vilified as exporters of ecological 'bads', as sites of bioeconomic value [367] It is here that post-modern technologies like cloud computing, social networks and big data promise to be useful enablers [301], while bioinformatics [368] and econometric models [241]…”