Food Waste Generation at Household Level: Results of a Survey among Employees of Two European Research Centers in Italy and Germany

By J. Jörissen, Carmen Priefer, Klaus-Rainer Bräutigam. 2015

378 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is a broad consensus in literature that private households are significant contributors to the total amount of food waste in the EU. Thus, any strategy to meaningfully combat food wastage must put the end consumer in the center of prevention activities. This requires deeper insights into people’s motivations to discard still edible food and knowledge about potential barriers to reduce wasting. This paper reports on results of an online survey among two European research centers in Italy (JRC/Ispra) and Germany (KIT/Karlsruhe). The focus of the survey was on households’ behaviors (shopping, eating, and food preparation habits) and its influence on the generation of food waste. Furthermore, reasons for the disposal of food as well as measures and technologies most needed to prevent wastage were discussed. The results of the survey are analyzed, especially with regard to two questions: (1) Are there considerable differences between Ispra and Karlsruhe? (2) Are there considerable similarities or inconsistencies with the results of previous studies?

Subfields: Food Science, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0600388dae02602d606f8ed9d520c13b98e79b14

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Food Science

1. Hong Liu
2. David Tonjes
3. C. Giordano
4. Krista L. Thyberg
5. Luca Falasconi
6. F. Alboni
7. Breda McCarthy

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

1. Hong Liu
2. C. Giordano
3. Luca Falasconi
4. F. Alboni
5. Breda McCarthy

Citations in the corpus

• Food Waste and the ‘Green’ Consumer (2017, methodology): “The presence of young children in the household can support organic food purchase due to health concerns of parents (Hill and Lynchehaun, 2002), but lead to more food waste, due to the demands of ‘fussy’ children (Jörissen et al., 2015).”
• Drivers of food waste and their implications for sustainable policy development (2016, background): “Household shopping practices, 389 particularly the size of the store where groceries are purchased and the frequency of shopping, 390 have been shown to affect wastage (Jorissen et al. 2015).”
• Packaging-Related Food Losses and Waste: An Overview of Drivers and Issues (2019, background): “Single households generate the most food waste per capita and by comparison, people in four-person households waste less than half than a person in a single household [56].”
• Quantities, Determinants, and Awareness of Households’ Food Waste in Italy: A Comparison between Diary and Questionnaires Quantities’ (2019, methodology): “Moreover, the assumption that questionnaires might be a wrong method to assess FW [9,27,36,46] has been verified, thus confirming the need for applying alternative methods.”