The actionability of household food waste reduction

Abstract

While technically feasible, completely avoiding certain waste in real-life may be challenging. We construct the concept of actionability to classify six causes for household food waste based on the difficulty of action to address them. Using data from an online survey of 1746 consumers from China, we show that the actionability-adjusted food waste is 2.4 to 10.6 percentage points lower than the traditional measure, translating to up to 7.2 million tons or $26.5 billion in reduced waste in 2019. The main causes of food waste are similar in total food and four main specific categories of food. Our statistical models show that consumer demographic characteristics also interact with the levels of actionability among different types of food. Our findings can advance the measurement of and the creation of more realistic and effective policies to reduce household food waste.