Abstract:As global concern about sustainability, food waste, and poverty increases, there is an urgent need to understand what motivates businesses to adopt pro-social and pro-environmental behaviours. This paper suggests that food redistribution organisations hold both pro-social and pro-environmental aims, due to their concern with reducing food surplus and food insecurity. To achieve this, they must motivate food businesses to donate their surplus food. However, little is known about the values, attitudes, and motives of food industry donors. The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical and conceptual overview to set out principles from which empirical data on food redistribution will be analysed or critiqued. Specifically, it explores pro-social and pro-environmental literature, as these fields have examined the motivations behind donations and reducing environmental impact. This review highlights that charitable giving of food is different to other inorganic material, such as money. Thus, future research is needed to capture the unique temporal, emotional, social, and environmental factors that motivate food donations. This information may contribute to the development of strategies that target and motivate people from the food industry to become food donors. Alternatively, it may reveal concerns about food donations, and highlight the need for other approaches to food waste and food insecurity.

Food waste is a global problem. In Australia alone, it is estimated that households throw away AU$5.2 billion worth of food (AU$616 per household) each year. Developed countries have formal waste management systems that provide measures of food waste. However, much remains unknown about informal food waste disposal routes and volumes outside of the formal system. This article provides indicative metrics of informal food waste by identifying, in detail, five of the dominant informal food waste disposal routes used by Australian households: home composting, feeding scraps to pets, sewer disposal, giving to charity, and dumping or incineration. Informal waste generation rates are then calculated from three primary data sources, in addition to data from previous Australian and UK surveys, using a weighted average method in conjunction with a Monte-Carlo simulation. We find that the average Australian household disposes of 2.6 kgs of food waste per week through informal routes (1.7 kgs via household composting, 0.2 kgs via animals, and 0.6 kgs via sewage). This represents 20% of Australian household food waste flows. Our results highlight that informal food waste is a sizable food waste flow from Australian homes, deserving of greater research and government attention. Our examination of the full extent of food waste by disposal mode provides waste managers and policy makers with clear disposal routes to target for behaviour change and positive environmental outcomes.

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