Post-Consumer Food Waste in the International Household
Written by Alexandros Achilleas Gloor, Emmanuella Anim, Jonathan Rodriguez, and Hammisha Brooks
Introduction
Across the world, 33% of food that is grown or produced for human consumption is discarded ( J. Gustavsson, U. Sonesson, C. Cederberg, 2011). The average household is said to spend roughly two-thousand dollars on food that is not consumed. Concerns among the food industry, agriculture, environmentalists, and scholars alike have since increased, as the unfavorable and nonsensical effects of food-waste has surfaced. In response, researchers have conducted countless researches to understand why so much food is wasted by homeowners, and thus, assess preventative measures.
This literature review is comprised of eight studies that were found with the use of educational-research libraries. These primary resources were published within the last decade to assure that the conclusions of our study are recent. No consideration will be given to waste treatment solutions that are not controllable by the consumers themselves, as we intend to prevent the issue at its source, rather than to set up alleviating methodologies. Among the eight studies–all based on food-waste in households– they included different aspects of the subject at hand. For example, Consumer Perception and Preference for Suboptimal food under the Emerging Practice of Expiration Date Based Pricing in Supermarkets by Jessica Aschemann-Witzel, Discussion on the methodology for determining food waste in household waste composition Studies by S. Lebersorger, F. Schneider, Discussion on The Methodology for Determining Food Waste in Household-waste Composition Studies by Monzón Santos and J.L.A, The Food Waste Hierarchy as a Framework for The Management of Food Surplus and Food-Waste by Papargyropoulou, E., Lozano, R., Steinberg, J. K., Wright, N., & bin Ujang Z, Food Wasters: Profiling Consumers’ Attitude to Waste Food in Italy, by Adorno, Valentina, Caldeira Sandra, Segre Andrea, Gaini Silvia, Vittuari Matteo, Household Food Waste in Montenegro by Berjan, S., Mrdalj, V., Bilali, El H., Velimirovic, A., Blagojevic, Z., et al, and Household food waste disposal in South Africa: A case study of Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni, by Oelofse, S., Muswema, A., and Ramukhwatho, F. The studies collectively contribute food-waste to various factors: poor meal-planning, lack of proper storage of foods, misunderstandings of best-before-dates, and excessive food preparation. To determine the validity of how much food is wasted in various countries, these studies analyzed the food supply of various countries and compared it to diet-intake surveys, and levels of obesity, among other components that gives an approximation as to how much food is being consumed. The studies, however, differ in that they used significantly different methods of analyzing participants’ result that contributed to overall data.
Our group first sought to investigate food-waste in supermarkets. However, after conducting brief searches for viable articles, we decided that it is best to limit our research to food-waste in households. The City College of New York (CCNY) library’s database was the main source that linked us to the articles that are analyzed in this literature review. To narrow our search results, specific keywords such as food waste, households, America, Europe, Africa, post-consumer, management, were used. With this helpful tool, the search results was considerably narrowed. Moreover, we only considered articles that were written within the past five-years.
Definitions
Food-waste is considered to be any consumable material that is disposed of at any point in the food chain. Post-consumer food waste originating from households is of particular interest to us. That is to say, the studies focus on all food or drink that is thrown out within households, either during cooking and preparation processes or as unconsumed trash, whether expired or not. The reason we selected post-consumer waste as our focus in the food chain rather than what Papargyropoulou, Lozano, Steinberger, Wright, and bin Ujang simplify as agriculture, processing, and retail, was due to the fact that a much bigger percentage of waste is produced in this step (2009). Food waste is then considered the usage of food, or lack thereof, for reasons that do not feed human beings, resulting in negative consequences for the environment, economy, and society (S. Monzon, 2017).
Europe
In the research Household Food Waste in Montenegro, Berjan, S. and colleagues focuses on the major sources of most food waste, which are cereal and bakery goods (Berjan et al, 2019). The hypothesis is to provide a general overview of food-waste in Montenegro at the consumer level. The measurement portion of the paper included an online survey with twenty-five questions. The questions were broken down into one-choice and multiple choice questions (Berjan et al, 2019). The questions fall under the topics of food purchase behavior and food expenditure estimation, knowledge of food labeling information, attitudes toward food-waste, the extent of household food-waste, the economic value of household food-waste, and willingness and information needed to reduce food waste (Berjan et al, 2019). Seventy percent of the participants of this survey were women, aged 44-years or younger. The online survey took 87 days to complete, from January to April of 2015; covering a time span of 15 minutes per each person taking the survey (Berjan et al, 2019).
It is documented that 70.1% of the population spend a maximum 5 to 25 Euros per month on food which economically speaking go to waste. According to Berjan, the percentages of understanding of labeling by the volunteers include 8.6% “used by”, 11.1% “best before” and 73% eat left over from previous day meaning less than a week ( 278). These percentages mean that the participants have a fair knowledge on food reaching the end of its freshness or when the food is safe for eating and these knowing affect their behavior on food wastage. That is saying before food products reach their due date, a household might give the food to their pets as a solution to avoid wasting food rather than throwing it in the garbage (Berjan et al, 2019). The statistics above shows 73% of leftovers eaten which is a surprisingly high amount of food being useful and not wasted. Despite knowing all these food labeling and making the uneaten food products useful in Montenegro, the issue still remains. It remains because Montenegrin, out of habit, discard of food they do not eat or do not feel safe to eat and this might be unintentional. Yes, labelling helps solve the issue but only to a certain point. This certain point maybe for example, a Montenegrin may start eating leftovers today and tomorrow choose to throw it out.
The limitations found in this paper was the lack of representation from the older generation since the experiment was carried-out online. This was because the older generation did not use as much social media network, as volunteers were contacted through such platforms.
In Italy, Silvia Gaiani, Sandra Caldeira, Valentina Adorno, Andrea Segre and Matteo Vittuari of the University of Bologna conducted a study that tied household food-waste to consumer behaviors, and the aim to bring awareness in order to limit household food waste. Participants were given a survey, which ultimately paralleled the amount of food a person wasted to their various personalities. Conscious fussy, conscious forgetful, unskilled cook, frugal consumer, confused about labelling, exaggerated cook and exaggerated shoppers, were more likely to discard of food. By making such distinctions, we understand people choose to waste food consciously or unconsciously based on their personalities.
By narrowing these distinctions or groups, knowledge can be implemented to those specific groups in order to limit food waste habits. Through these efforts, the total amount of food-waste will decrease over time and limit the different aspects of wasting food. However, after the study was conducted, the majority of respondents reported being conscious of the environment while grocery-shopping, 70% stated concerns over food issues, and a small percentage stated being unconcerned for food-waste issue. This study proves to be important since food waste is a global issue in most developed countries. This study proves as a guideline for showing how personal choice is a main contributor to food-waste worldwide.
The significance of this study helps to identify data for food-waste in meat, and how the different food-waste categories (according to personalities), show how people react to expiration dates on food. Our study has a large focus on food waste of meat, and these numbers will aid us in the overall study. With this research we see how people react when it comes to meat that is near expiration dates. As for personalities, the conscious fussy type is mainly affected by the smell or the looks of food that they are purchase. They do, however, check expiration dates to see to analyze if the food is ‘good’ or not for consumption. The frugal consumer did not waste a significant amount of food. (Elsevier, 23). Those in the confused type were unsure of the labeling of products and did not know the difference between “use by” and “best by” dates. The majority of them also bought their food online. (Elsevier, 23).
The ‘Unskilled-Cook’ group often chose to eat pre-cooked food, and did not keep track of the amount of food they bought and discarded of. This group reported that they personally contributed to global food-waste. (Elsevier, 23). The ‘Exaggerating-Cook’ group reportedly bought excessive food that they previously did not enjoy, and as a result, ended up being wasted because of mold accumulation. (Elsevier, 23). The ‘Conscious-Forgetful’ group reportedly wasted food due to their forgetfulness of foods they’ve previously bought and stored in their refrigerator. (Elsevier, 23). The ‘Exaggerated Shopper’ represents 6.7% of household food waste reportedly bought packaged food that they feared running-out of. This group usually lives alone and wastes a large amount of dairy products. They do shopping and waste food once or twice a week. They represent 3% of the sample. (Elsevier, 23).
In the United Kingdom, about 64% of all food waste is reported as avoidable according to the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) study conducted in the last decade. That amounts to 5.3 million tonnes per year with the greatest waste products being fruits and vegetables (WRAP, 2009). In the study, estimations were made as to what percentage of this waste could have been avoided with better preparation, careful consideration and understanding of the “use by” and “best before” dates, and consumption of leftovers. For an average household with children, this cost about 680 pounds annually (WRAP, 2009). The percentages offered by this research are expected to closely match data from other first-world countries, such as France, Canada, and the United States, as the cultural treatment and consumption of food is similar across the western world.
Africa
The aim of the case study in South Africa was to improve the limited data found on food waste in developing nations, which is due to the global assumption that developed countries dispose of more food than developing countries (Oelofse, Muswema, & Ramukhwatho, 2018). A key point in this study is learning how to value food now would benefit us much more than we think. This is because by the year 2050 the human population would increase to a standard estimate of 9.6 billion (Oelofse, Muswema, & Ramukhwatho, 2018). Food and water may become scarce when we continue to live the lifestyle of today, that is household food waste.
Our findings on household food waste in South Africa showed a randomly chosen route of the selected areas meant for conducting this experiment. The selected areas include houses of different socio-economic background (high, middle, and low-income class). One person accompanies the waste collecting vehicle to record the serviced household (Oelofse, Muswema, & Ramukhwatho, 2018). The food waste was sorted into edible and inedible categories. The waste disposal was calculated in kilograms per household per week, whereby the mass of each weighed waste by the number of households serviced. The mass of food waste was multiplied by the percentage of food waste and the total household waste (Oelofse, Muswema, & Ramukhwatho, 2018).
The limitation of this study was the difficulty in determining the number of household food waste collected (Oelofse, Muswema, & Ramukhwatho, 2018). Meaning townhouse complexes, apartment buildings, and communal collection points did not have a clear statistic on people in the household and a general statistic of households within such vicinities. Therefore, such complexes, building, and points were excluded from the results. Data that were statistically clear were included in the result(s).
United States
In the United States, retail and consumer levels of food waste reach more than 40%. (Plos One, 2). Through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), research has been found that 12% of the food given to children during lunch is wasted and thrown away. In a sixth grade class, dairy was highly wasted and 74% for the vegetables served to them. The total food waste continues to exceed 20% and in this study there were differences in food-waste when it came to boys and girls of different ages. For this study, fifty adults were used and the Remote Food Photography Method (RFPM) and taking the percentages of food eaten or thrown away from food each adult is already use to consuming.
The three meals eaten by the adults each day of the week was recorded and the participants were required to take pictures of their food before consumption and note of any times where they had seconds of a select piece of food. The participants were also required to eat laboratory meals provided to them. The age-range of the adults were from 18 to 65 years of age and had no major illness or critical health conditions. The laboratory meals given consisted of pretzels, cookies and a fruit cup. Due to the large age gap, it widened the studies demographics. For the meals of the participants, the calorie density, grams chosen, number of servings and percentage of energy in fat, carbohydrates and protein. The amount of food eaten across participants varied and the results ended in 6% of food on a participants given plate was put to waste.
For the percentages of specific foods wasted, 14% wasted was on vegetables, 26% on grain products, 20% were of meats, 15% dairy, 6% fruits and 11% on sugars. For sugar filled beverages they made up 82% of food waste. The overall number was food being wasted on a particular plate was 3.3% of the food wasted. While other studies focus on a single meal, during lunch this study proved most accurate because it recorded a laboratory meal as a constant plus the meals eaten everyday by the participants in the study. Those meals eaten by the participants were meals that they themselves chose, which offered more results because they chose what to eat and still food was wasted.
Another study conducted by S. Lebersorger and F. Schneider, focused on informing households about food-waste and ways to reduce this problem, which inturn, decreases the amount of food that is seamlessly wasted each year. The methodology used waste-composition analyses, kitchen diaries and a review of existing waste data. The study was conducted by establishing “self-measurement methods such as kitchen diaries or questionnaire surveys, which represent the participants’ subjective point-of-view and required significant effort on their part (S. Lebersorger et al, 2011). In order to determine the proportion and composition of food waste, the groups were given, at random, 120 and 1100 litres containers and the waste was measured over the course of four months.
The results showed that the proportion of food-waste as a result of packaging amounted to only 8% of overall avoidable food waste (Bauer, 2002, S. Lebersorger et al., 2011). Significant influences of food waste packaging were only found for product categories such as jams and sauces, but whose proportion in residual waste were insignificant. Waste composition studies provide a database about the proportion of food waste, though they are not able to cover all aspects. The results of the case study indicated a significant higher proportion of preparation residues and avoidable food-waste in urban than in rural areas, and a significantly higher proportion of avoidable food waste in residual waste from multi-family dwellings. However, no conclusions could be deduced about the influence of the availability of a biowaste container on the property, for which additional information about collection quantities of residual waste and biowaste, composition of separately collected biowaste and home composting would be required. This study also supports the conclusion that fruits and fresh vegetables, along with meat, are wasted the most in households. It implies that when people are more knowledgeable of food waste, they tend to buy wiser, and thus reduce food-waste.
Greenhouse Effect
Food wastage leads to unnecessary environmental impacts at all steps of the food chain. The production of vegetables leads to the pollution of water deposits, deforestation, the extinction of animal species, and the fertilization of soil (Goudie, 113). Vegetable and fruit fertilizers used in most production sources pollute the environment through their use of dinitrogen oxide and other pollutants. Meat production leads to similar impacts, while milk and beef production also produces CH4emissions (WRAP, 2009). The transportation of food products also leads to carbon dioxide emissions (WRAP, 2009).
Conclusion
While solutions for the processing of waste has been suggested by previous researchers, the aim of this paper is to tackle the problem at its source. Instead of promoting the usage of chemical processes–as a way to decompose organic materials– and reusing of post-consumer food waste (waste management), consumers themselves must learn how to refrain from discarding food that is still good for consumption (waste prevention); for it’s at this point of the food-chain that most food are wasted (Papargyropoulou, 2014). Consumers must be more cognizant (being aware) of the consequences that such actions as these have on the environment. Another step at which a lot of food gets thrown out in the household is during storage itself. Either storage is placed in inappropriate environments, is forgotten, or gets thrown out due to a misunderstanding of what the ‘best before’ and ‘use by’ dates are describing. To prevent wastage at this step, we propose the promotion of careful reading of the storage instructions on the packaging are proposed. Finally we note that while ‘use by’ dates denote the expiry of a food product, and as such should not be consumed after said date, ‘best before’ dates in fact simply denote when the product is in its best condition. In most cases can still be consumed past this period if it looks and smells right and assuming it was stored as per the packaging’s instructions (NHS, 2018). In the study of general food waste in the United States, there was a flaw in the study. Instead of categorizing the likes/dislikes of what people preferred for food like the research done in Italy.
In South Africa, we found that the average food waste disposed of per household in Johannesburg was 0.69 kg/week which is higher than that in Ekurhuleni 0.48 kg/week in all income categories (Oelofse, Muswema, & Ramukhwatho, 2018) . The results indicate that there are no statistically significant differences in the food waste generated by households. Also, there’s no correlation between municipalities and income levels. South Africa waste as much as developed nations, more so than the rest of the sub- Saharan Africa. The discussion seen in the case study includes the reasoning that food waste has no correlation with income or wealth in a household; both poor and rich waste food (Oelofse, Muswema, & Ramukhwatho, 2018) .
Upon receiving responses from volunteers, we notice 89.4% of the answers included people willing to reduce food waste if they are well informed and educated on the topic (Berjan et al, 2019). Montenegrins are willing to make a behavioral change on the issue at hand. We can predict that the more we make people aware of household food waste, there will be a greater chance for resolving the problem.
Summary
Food waste is a major issue that drains the use of scarce natural resources and stands as a moral problem due to situations of inequality of food accessibility worldwide—proving to be an environmental, social, and economic issue around the world.
In order to tackle this issue, increased in the use of discounted suboptimal food should be implemented. Moreover, specific labels used on stickers of products which indicate expiration dates, is then considered a suboptimal food and will help the environment and consumers with shared ideology as it pertains to food-purchase. It’s also a budgeting mechanism—one that is favored by organic-produce consumers. This is significant because it increases their perception of ‘best-buy’ dates and food quality—reducing the likelihood of food-waste.
This article ties in with other studies hoping to find solutions and answers to food waste its prevention. It tackles this issue through experimentation with what is best to communicate onto the expiration date stickers and how to make them more appealing, as well as sociodemographic attributes, such as gender and product familiarity.
The significance of this research will aid us in finding further reasons on how expiration dates affect organic products, and give us more information on consumer attributes to why they choose certain foods, how their gender, and familiarity of the product comes into play.
Limitations and Further Implications
Due to time limitations we were unable to include research articles from all countries that have published Food Waste reports. Our study, while international, is limited in scope to only a few select countries that are intended to represent general global trends. It is crucial that further reviews be conducted to include many more developing countries as we expect food consumption and production to look significantly different and provide distinctly different results compared to that of developed countries.
Within our research we discovered a distinct gap in produced studies. This is with regards to varied eaters being assessed according to their regular eating habits, in one group. This method would produce the most accurate results and as such our group proposes to conduct such a study with a large enough pool to produce results with the highest of accuracy. The outcome of such a study would not only identify key sources of food waste, like the specific actions in the post-consumer step that produce the most amount of trash (eg. storing, preparing), but it would also identify how food waste can be prevented for each category of consumer identified by previous studies. On the other hand, other studies within this research, as mentioned earlier, used different methods of analyzing the different reasons behind food-waste in households. This is problematic because, though we’re given valid data, the bases on which each was carried out is different, and so the studies focused on different aspect within one specific topic. As an alternative, more studies in said countries can perform experiments that are focused on the same thing(s). Doing so will result in admissible and conclusive data with little-to-no-gaps.
Likewise, these were all survey-based observational studies that revolved around household food-waste. Therefore, the use of other methods to measure food-waste would certainly be more accurate. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 137.7 million tons of municipal solid waste were placed in landfills in 2015. The greatest percentage of municipal solid wastes placed in these landfills were food, at 22% (N/A, 2018). Food wastes exceeds any other type of solid wastes in landfills. This is due to the increased amount of food waste thrown away per person or household on a yearly basis. Directly measuring discarded food from households that end up in landfills around the world would contribute to a more effective study.
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