Abstract
Household food waste has negative, and largely unnecessary, environmental, social and economic impacts. A better understanding of current household food waste disposal is needed to help develop and implement effective interventions to reduce food wasting. A four-season waste characterization study was undertaken with 200 single-family households across eight neighbourhoods in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The City of Toronto provides residents with a pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) waste program that includes a choice of four garbage cart sizes (Small [S], Medium [M], Large [L], Extra Large [XL]), with increasing annual user fees ($18.00–$411.00 CAD), as well as a green cart (organic waste) and blue cart (recycling). On average, each household disposed 4.22 kg/week of total food waste, 69.90% of which was disposed in the green cart, and disposal increased significantly (p = 0.03) by garbage cart size to L but not XL garbage carts. Of this total, 61.78% consisted of avoidable food waste, annually valued at $630.00–$847.00 CAD/household. Toronto’s PAYT waste program has been effective at diverting food waste into the green cart but not at reducing its generation. Higher median incomes were positively correlated, while higher neighbourhood dwelling and population density were negatively correlated, with total and avoidable food waste disposal. Regression analyses explained 40–67% of the variance in total avoidable food waste disposal. Higher supermarket density and distance to healthier food outlets were associated with more, while dwelling density was related to less, total and avoidable food waste disposal. Distance to fast food restaurants and less healthy food outlet density were both negatively associated with avoidable food waste disposal in the garbage and green cart, respectively. Avoidable food waste reduction interventions could include increasing garbage cart fees, weight-based PAYT, or messaging to households on the monetary value of avoidable food waste, and working with food retailers to improve how households shop for their food.
Highlights
Food waste is a societal inefficiency that spans the various parts of the food supply chain, and results in negative, and largely unnecessary, environmental, social and economic impacts
Households disposed an average of 4.22 kg/week of food waste, with 69.90% placed in the green cart (Table 1), and the rest placed mostly in the garbage cart, with very small amounts inappropriately placed in the blue cart
Sample households in Toronto disposed an average of 4.22 kg/household/week of total food waste, with 69.90% disposed in the green cart
Summary
Food waste is a societal inefficiency that spans the various parts of the food supply chain, and results in negative, and largely unnecessary, environmental, social and economic impacts. It can be divided into avoidable food waste, which is food that was at one point edible, or unavoidable food waste (e.g., vegetable peels, bones) [1,2]. In this study we used direct measurement of curbside waste samples to quantify and better understand curbside household food waste disposal in the City of Toronto, Ontario, Canada (hereafter ‘City’ or ‘Toronto’). Toronto is the largest city in Canada, with a population of over 2.8 million. We measured potential associations between curbside food waste disposal with their pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) waste program, sociodemographic, socioeconomic and neighbourhood food environment variables
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