What's driving food waste?

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.

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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.