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The EU Carbon-CAP project assembled a comprehensive portfolio of consumer initiatives in order to assess the potential total impact of consumer options on national carbon footprints. Existing evaluations of behavioural change have focused primarily on direct energy reductions, typically in households and buildings. However, changes in consumer demand have deeper impacts via their upstream supply chains. The consumer behaviour options considered in the portfolio focus on green household initiatives. Combining existing micro-level studies with a multiregional input-output economic model, we estimated the potential efficacy and uptake of each behaviour across the European Union (EU). The results suggest that adopting these consumer options could reduce carbon footprints by approximately 25%. While 75% of this is delivered as reductions in emissions within Europe, one-quarter of the effect is delivered as a reduced imported carbon footprint, due to changes in the composition of imports. Key policy insights. Consumer initiatives can have a big effect on embodied carbon imports, in addition to domestic impacts. We connect a portfolio of ∼90 green behaviour changes to a global supply chain database to model impacts holistically. We estimate that with reasonable levels of adoption green consumer actions can reduce the EU CO2 footprint by 25%. A quarter of this effect is delivered in the form of reduced embodied emissions in imports ARTICLE HISTORY

To significantly reduce the volumes of food currently wasted in industrialized countries, tackling food waste on the household level is paramount. While awareness campaigns and economic incentives are important measures, it is crucial to look beyond individual decision making and scrutinize how contextual factors frame consumer lifestyles in ways that intensify the issue of food going to waste. This paper addresses the role of material contexts—in particular, infrastructures and technologies—in the shaping of food shopping and storing practices and thus consumer food waste. It presents an in‐depth, qualitative study with 24 Austrian households, conducted from November 2016 to February 2017. Data were collected through food waste diaries, semi‐structured interviews and a total of 16 focus group discussions. In line with other studies, we find that food waste is a largely unintended outcome of entangled daily routines revolving around food, such as meal planning, grocery shopping and food storing. The characteristics of food retail infrastructures—in terms of accessibility, density and type—shape these routines and thus potentially influence excess food purchases. Food storing practices as well depend on the characteristics of domestic infrastructures and co‐evolve with technologies used for storing food. Unraveling the interconnectivity between material contexts and household food practices can inform policy, product design and food retail development and thus has implications for reducing consumer food waste.