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Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

Reasons for household food waste with special attention to packaging

TLDR
The amount of food waste needs to be reduced in order to sustain the world's limited resources and secure enough food to all humans as mentioned in this paper, and Packaging plays an important role in reducing food waste.
About
This article is published in Journal of Cleaner Production.The article was published on 2012-03-01 and is currently open access. It has received 434 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Food packaging & Food waste.

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Citations
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Food waste matters - A systematic review of household food waste practices and their policy implications

TL;DR: In this article, the authors map the still small but expanding academic territory of consumer food waste by systematically reviewing empirical studies on food waste practices as well as distilling factors that foster and impede the generation of food waste on the household level.
Journal ArticleDOI

Drivers of food waste and their implications for sustainable policy development

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored the drivers of residential, institutional, and commercial food waste generation in developed countries, particularly in the U.S., and examined the impacts of food system modernization on food waste, including impacts related to food system industrialization, urbanization, globalization, and economic growth.
Journal ArticleDOI

Consumer-related food waste: causes and potential for action

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the results of a literature review and expert interviews on factors causing consumer-related food waste in households and supply chains, highlighting that synergistic actions between all parties are most promising.
Journal ArticleDOI

Sorting out food waste behaviour: A survey on the motivators and barriers of self-reported amounts of food waste in households

TL;DR: In this article, the authors conducted a large mail survey in Switzerland to investigate which determinants explain the self-reported amount of food waste in households, taking into account personal norms, knowledge, household planning habits and the good provider identity.
Journal ArticleDOI

Missing Food, Missing Data? A Critical Review of Global Food Losses and Food Waste Data

TL;DR: It is found that most existing publications on FLW quantification are conducted for a few industrialized countries, and over half of them are based only on secondary data, which signals high uncertainties in the existing global FLW database.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Common method biases in behavioral research: a critical review of the literature and recommended remedies.

TL;DR: The extent to which method biases influence behavioral research results is examined, potential sources of method biases are identified, the cognitive processes through which method bias influence responses to measures are discussed, the many different procedural and statistical techniques that can be used to control method biases is evaluated, and recommendations for how to select appropriate procedural and Statistical remedies are provided.
Book

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

TL;DR: Cialdini's "Influence", the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say "yes" - and how to apply these understandings as mentioned in this paper.
Posted ContentDOI

Estimating and Addressing America's Food Losses

TL;DR: The U.S. food supply provides an estimated 3,800 calories per person per day, enough to supply every American with more than one and a half times their average daily energy needs.
Journal ArticleDOI

Environmental impact of packaging and food losses in a life cycle perspective: a comparative analysis of five food items

TL;DR: The environmental concern and development issues regarding packaging has for 20 years to a high extent been on packaging when it has become waste To reduce the environmentalimpact from the whole world as mentioned in this paper...
Journal ArticleDOI

Food losses in food service institutions Examples from Sweden

TL;DR: Lowering food losses is a potential measure to overcome hunger and reduce the ecological side effects from the food system as mentioned in this paper, however, few observations of food losses have been reported in the liter...
Related Papers (5)
Frequently Asked Questions (13)
Q1. How much food waste is disposed of in the household?

About one third of the total food waste consists of prepared food: home-cooked food, heated semi-prepared food or cold mixed food, such as salads. 

In a Norwegian study, 15% of the consumers said that packaging is an important cause for food waste, and 30% of the consumers stated that the too large packages are one important cause for food waste (Fredriksen et al., 2010). 

Price awareness may influence the households to buy larger packages and save money per kilogram of food, which may result in more waste. 

The wastage of avoidable food waste in average households in UK, Norway, and Sweden is about 4 kg/week (Quested and Johnson 2009; Fredriksen et al., 2010, SEPA, 2005). 

The behavioural study from Cox and Downing (2007) reveals that environmentally conscious people are more likely to agree that packaging is a more important issue than food waste. 

Variation in packaging sizes to meet various demands, or adding a lid to make the packaging re-sealable are examples of direct aspects. 

There is also always the risk of social desirability bias with self-reporting; people respond/behave more to what they believe is socially desirable rather than to be truthful in surveys and questionnaires (Podsakoff et.al., 2003; Banjo and Val, 2011). 

Four households in this study indicated that they liked the liquid board packaging with a screw lid and 22 indicated that they disliked it. 

Two groups were created based on the answers given for the two price statements, one group with answers from 8 to 14 that noted price to be more important, and one group with answers from 2 to 7 that noted price to be less important. 

In their sample, 20–25% of the food waste was related to the packaging design attributes, both the ones observed by consumers (easy to empty, too big packaging) and the one added by the authors (information attribute best-before-date). 

In the UK, between 75% and 90% of the consumers agreed that discarded packaging is a greater environmental issue than food that is wasted (Cox and Downing, 2007; wrap, 2007a). 

This group of households was chosen for the study because they were believed to be more observant of reasons for food waste than ordinary households. 

Since one-person households waste more per capita, and since it is an increasing household type in Europe, it would be interesting to further study this groups’ packaging related waste.