Elsevier

Environmental Science & Policy

Volume 88, October 2018, Pages 63-71
Environmental Science & Policy

Throwing it out: Introducing a nexus perspective in examining citizen perceptions of organizational food waste in the U.S.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2018.06.012Get rights and content

Highlights

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    This research examines concern about food waste and policy preferences to reduce food waste in a nationally representative sample.

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    We examines food waste as an environmental issue in relation to the water-energy-food nexus.

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    The analysis examines individual awareness of the water-energy-food nexus.

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    Nexus awareness is highly predictive of concern about food waste and policy support to reduce food waste.

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    Provides legislative options for policymakers to reduce food waste.

Abstract

While advocacy groups and environmentalists have sought to highlight the issue of food waste, relatively little is known about individual citizen concern about food wasted by organizations in the U.S. This paper examines the extent to which individuals are concerned about organizational food waste, and to what extent they would support policies intended to reduce food waste. We also address how food waste reduces efficiencies in the water-energy-food nexus. We use a nationally representative sample of survey respondents to identify the personal characteristics that relate to concern about food waste and to corrective public policies. We expand the use of water-energy-food awareness indexes and examine if nexus awareness influences opinions and policies regarding food waste. Results show that nexus awareness, or awareness of the interconnections between food-water and food-energy, is significantly related to food waste concern and policy preferences to reduce food waste. We conclude with some strategies and policy recommendations on increasing awareness and action to reduce food waste.

Section snippets

Organizational food waste

In recent years, the culture of waste has been addressed in the media highlighting some practices about organizational food waste. A number of documentaries have highlighted these practices in creative and entertaining ways. It is unclear, however, if individuals recognize the amounts of food wasted by organizations, express any concern about that waste, and what they prefer to have done about the issue. Individuals may experience or interact with organizational food waste very differently. For

Food waste: the nexus perspective

Food waste is a central contributing factor to losses and inefficiencies in the food-water-energy nexus as the wasted or lost food inevitably wastes energy and water. Currently, there is much focus and emphasis in the physical sciences about sustainable practices and management of the food-water-energy nexus. Studies of nexus issues highlight the numerous interactions or connections between food, water, and energy or a subset of that natural resource triad, i.e., water and energy, energy and

Data

The data used to determine the extent to which individuals express concern about organizational food waste, and whether or not they support policies intended to reduce food waste come from a nationally representative survey administered in August 2015. The survey was designed to cover a range of food-water-energy nexus issues as well as issues in the overall environment. GfK Custom Research, LLC administered this national public opinion survey of adults 18 years and older. The survey was in the

Dependent variables

We examine 3 dependent variables that address concern for food waste and the extent to which the respondent would support policies aimed at reducing waste. The first survey question asks, “How concerned are you about the amount of food wasted by grocery stores, restaurants, and cafeterias?” The response options are 1=not concerned, 2=somewhat concerned, 3=concerned, 4=very concerned, and 5=extremely concerned.2

Predictor variables

The literature points to several sociodemographic characteristics as independent variables in the food waste analysis: gender, age, education, household income, race and ethnicity, and household size. The first is gender, where 1=female and 0=otherwise. Koivupuro and Kaisa (2012) find that households where women are primarily responsible for the grocery shopping in Finnish homes had a clear impact on the amount of avoidable food waste, but we are unsure if these results will be similar when

Results

Descriptive statistics are presented in Table 1 and the results of the statistical analysis are presented in Table 2 through Table 4. Predictor variables show minimal amounts of collinearity with a mean variance inflation factor (VIF) for the full model of 1.32. As seen in Table 1, the mean of each dependent variable is above 3 which suggests that the average respondent show some concern about food waste from organizations and are somewhat willing to support policies aimed at reducing food

Discussion, limitations, and conclusions

Issues of food waste have been evaluated from several academic perspectives, such as managerial, behavioral, environmental, economic, and public policy (Porpino, 2016). This paper uses nationally representative survey data to examine the extent to which individuals are concerned about organizational food waste as well as support for policies intended to reduce food waste. Ours is one of very few studies on food waste that uses a national sample in the U.S. (Neff et al., 2015) and the first to

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