WWW (What, Where and Why) of Household Food Waste Behaviour project

Objectives
Australia, like most countries worldwide, faces issues with food waste generation and its appropriate disposal. Hence, the identification of effective policies and programs to change households’ food waste generation and recycling behaviour – reducing food waste into landfill is therefore urgently needed. This CRC project was led by University of Adelaide, with partners East Waste, Green Industries SA (GISA) and Rawtec. The aim of the project was to understand Adelaide metropolitan household’s and the broader community’s food waste behaviours in order to deliver targeted education, behaviour change and
incentive-based programs. This was delivered through two broad project activities:
1) Increased understanding of factors that drive household food waste behaviour, and how it differs across space, time, and demographics; and
2) Insight into the cost-effectiveness of how differing incentives, education and regulation can change behaviour.
The project provided the following reports (which provide more detail as needed):
• Final Project Report of literature review: The WWW of Household Food Waste Behaviour: Literature Review, 43 pages (Xu et al., 2022a);
• First-round online draft survey report: Online Survey Results of Adelaide Residents’ Food Waste Behaviour, 1,030 people surveyed, work still ongoing and now associated with Trang Nguyen’s PhD work (Nguyen et al., 2022);
• Final report of bin audit: City of Burnside household bin-by-bin audit results, totally 643 bins were audited while 208 had matched pairs and 175 households had matched bins audited (Rawtec, 2022). A fact sheet was also produced (see Appendix);
• Final report of bin audit and mail-out survey: Linking City of Burnside Household Bin-by-Bin Audit, mail-out survey, associated Socio-Demographics, 65 household matched (Wheeler et al., 2022a);
• Final report of online experiment: Exploring Adelaide residents’ preferences for alternative food waste policies, 1,520 people surveyed (Wheeler et al., 2022b); and
• Journal paper on modelling impacts of council food waste policies: Evaluating policy changes on council waste generation and diversion: evidence from South Australia, monthly data modelling from 2006-2020 in eight Adelaide metropolitan councils (Xu et al., 2023)

Results
Some key results from the work conducted in the project include:
• Our review of the literature identified factors influencing food waste behaviours, as well as the various incentives that can change household environmental waste behaviour.
• Different measurements (such as online and mailout surveys, plus coupled bin audits) were used to quantify food waste. These confirmed that respondents do not really know the exact amounts of waste they produce using self-reporting methods, which was more reliably revealed by household bin audits. Moreover, households tend to overstate their true behaviour using self-reporting measurements, no matter if it was online survey, mailout survey or online experiment study. Households think they are much better at diverting food waste than they actually are.
• Our bin audit results in various suburbs across the City of Burnside showed that although disposal levels varied a lot across households, they discarded 3.6 kg of food waste per week.
• Regarding the impact that various food waste policies have on changing behaviour, it was found: o the longitudinal monthly analysis on Adelaide metropolitan council data from 2006-2020provided evidence that food diversion into organic bins and provision of food caddies stimulated household waste diversion. No significant impact was found for education.

The experiment survey on respondents’ perceptions regarding four proposed food waste policies found that frequency collection pricing charges were the most effective policy, followed by penalties, frequency bin collection structural change, and education.

Hence, there is agreement between our various analyses that educational food waste/recycling campaigns alone have no significant impact on reducing waste or increasing recycling, and that economic incentives and diversion collection systems may be the most effective.