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Research
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Project overview

What's driving food waste?

In New South Wales, the average household disposes of around six litres of food waste a week.

Run by the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA), the Love Food Hate Waste (LFHW) program seeks to raise awareness about the environmental, economic and social impacts of food waste as a strategy for reducing the amount of food waste being sent to landfill.

What did we do?

To assist with the ongoing development of the LFHW program, the EPA asked BehaviourWorks to conduct a rapid evidence and practice review of household food waste and behaviour.

The challenge:
Understand the behavioural drivers behind food waste
Partners:
NSW Environment Protection Authority
When:
2017

What did we find?

The reviews revealed just how complex food waste avoidance behaviours are, and showed that there are significant gaps in the academic literature on the topic worldwide.

This knowledge gap may be due to the fact that food waste is not a behaviour in itself; rather that certain behaviours add up to food being wasted or not (i.e. purchasing too much food when shopping or writing a list and eating leftovers).

The report concluded that, while food waste education programs like Love Food Hate Waste are effective in helping people to reduce food waste, more work needs to be done to understand how certain behaviours impact food waste in practice.

Recommendations

The research team recommended further research be undertaken to ‘untangle’ some of the complexity around the issue to enable the EPA to target funds to where they are most needed.

They also identified opportunities through existing NSW programs to conduct experiments with households to test various ideas and interventions.

This is an important issue with multiple impacts, including the cost to individual households wasting food, so we look forward to revealing further insights in the future.

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Finance
Transport and road safety
Social inclusion
Conservation
Waste
Climate change
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Environmental education
Energy
Organisational change
Pollution
Health and safety

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