An Innovative, Accessible, and Flexible Approach for Household Food Waste Measurement - Laboratory

he Lab Study will be conducted at PBRC and will include participants (N=25) from a wide array of social and economic groups will be recruited and trained on the use of the FoodImage app. Participants use the app to measure food waste (including foods with inedible parts) created during a simulated meal preparation setting, a simulated meal consumption setting with plate waste, and a simulated cabinet and refrigerator clean-out of spoiled and out-of-date foods, where the number of items and the amounts of waste for each task is randomly assigned across participants and blinded from the research staff evaluating images and coding data. These participants will denote the normal discard destination (I.e., garbage, sink/disposal, feed to animal, compost) for each item as if the waste had occurred in their own home. The resulting photos will be processed, and data created using the methods detailed in our previously published work.

All foods to be measured by the participant during each task will be weighed by staff. Then, the items that participants note as suitable for discard via sink, garbage disposal, fed to pet or compost in their own homes are set aside and appropriately documented with the remaining items thrown in a standard trash bag that also contains waste amounts and types that mirror US solid municipal waste figures (about 80% of waste is non-food). The bag of combined waste will be given to a hired contractor who will sort and weigh the waste, thus creating a second estimate of waste and its key components using standard industry practices.

Three to five days after completing the lab tasks, participants will receive the retrospective online survey and complete it for the tasks they completed during the lab study. Estimates of food waste (edible portions only) will be constructed from the survey results using methods previously described.