Abstract
Household food waste represents one of the main challenges for sustainable development as this directly affects the economy of food consumers, the loss of natural resources and generates additional greenhouse gas emissions. The COVID-19 pandemic and its mitigation strategies caused one of the most serious economic crises in recent decades and could become the worst economic crisis that Latin America has had in its history. The objective of this study is to analyze changes in food waste behavior during the COVID-19 lockdown in Colombia in 2020, applying the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). For this purpose, we conducted a survey with 581 Colombian food consumers, which examined the influence of intentions to not waste food, subjective norms, some situational predictors, questions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the control of perceived behavior on food waste. The results suggest that the TPB can predict the intention to not waste food and, through it, the actual household food waste behavior, considering the lockdown in Colombia as an external shock. We observe that regarding the intention to not waste food, the most relevant variables are attitudes, subjective norms, control of the perceived behavior, and concerns regarding the Covid-19 pandemic. These variables increase the probability on average by a 0.8 Odds Ratio that the intention not to waste food increases, too. Regarding food waste behavior, whether it is considered ordinal or nominal, we see that the most relevant variables are intention, financial attitudes, and control of perceived behavior, doubling the probability that food waste behavior will improve. Based on the results, we provide recommendations for interested stakeholders that can help in the design of instruments for household food waste reduction.
Highlights
Food waste and loss account for about a third of the global annual food production volume (Gustavsson et al, 2011) and, despite the end consumer being the protagonist (Griffin et al, 2009), 13.8% of the global food leakage occurs at many different stages of the food value chains (FAO, 2017)
During the data cleaning process, we considered the averages of the items that make up each of the dimensions and constructed eight variables from 22 items, namely (i) Attitudes about food waste, (ii) Subjective norms, (iii) Control of perceived behavior, (iv) Moral standards, (v) Financial attitudes, (vi) Identity of a good supplier, (vii) Intention to not waste food, and (viii) Declared behavior regarding food waste (Table 1). (iii) COVID-19 lockdown questions that show the effect of fear and the search for normality: During extreme situations such as a pandemic, individuals tend to take a self-protective behavior and change their consumption patterns whenever they feel that this will keep them more protected (Lau et al, 2006; Bish and Michie, 2010)
This document examined the effectiveness of the Theory of Planned Behavior to predict the intention and behavior regarding household food waste in the four major cities of Colombia, considering the COVID-19 lockdown as a case study
Summary
Food waste and loss account for about a third of the global annual food production volume (Gustavsson et al, 2011) and, despite the end consumer being the protagonist (Griffin et al, 2009), 13.8% of the global food leakage occurs at many different stages of the food value chains (FAO, 2017). While food loss occurs throughout the value chains, food waste happens at the retail and consumption levels (FAO, 2019). According to the United Nations (UN., 2020b), from 2017 to 2019, 79 countries and the European Union reported on at least one national policy instrument that contributed to the implementation of the 10Year Framework of Programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production. Regions such as East Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, and North America demonstrate a higher level of sustainability reporting, including water use and waste, than Africa, Central Asia, and Oceania (UN., 2020a)
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