Food waste - Patterns of perception and behaviour in the disposal of foodstuffs along the value chain

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ulrich Jürgens
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 438805450

The discussion surrounding the disposal of foodstuffs or, negatively expressed, food waste has only begun to gain significance in policy, planning and academic discourse in the last few years. In comparison to other types of waste, food waste has attracted little attention, firstly, because it is often unconsciously and, especially in private households, invisibly disposed of, rather than in formal waste containers. Furthermore, there is a lack of agreement in the interdisciplinary discourse concerning not only the very definition of food waste, but also its quantitative assessment, the groups of actors involved, methods of determining the causes of food waste and the interventions consequently proposed. The investigations conducted to date have been dominated by approaches from behavioural psychology and sociology, focusing on private households in order to analyse the diverse motives that lead to the creation of food waste. This investigation therefore aims to extend the food waste discourse by considering the spatial dimension, which has been completely neglected thus far. This involves no longer only considering the living conditions of private households on the micro-level, but also focusing on the producers and retail sources of (fresh) foodstuffs that are particularly prone to food waste on the meso-level. The attitudes and perceptions of private households concerning food waste can then be explained and spatially differentiated using the areas of origin and structural characteristics of their food stuffs like production conditions or packaging sizes. This should allow behavioural segmentation to identify target groups among the private households, and their perceptions and behaviour to be linked to shopping patterns and locatable attitudes to groceries such as locality, region and home. Quantitative and qualitative investigations are conducted in rural and urban areas of the case-study region of Schleswig-Holstein, not only with the aim of diagnosing the causes of food waste, but also to determine the types and extent of communication between the various groups of actors concerned so as to identify lessons that may be learnt in an effort to avoid food waste.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants