A ranking method for prioritising retail store food waste based on monetary and environmental impacts

Abstract

Food waste has become a major concern globally, leading to high economic, environmental and social awareness, as well as inclusion in international policy documents. In the developed world, the retail stage has the greatest potential for waste reduction as it balances demand with supply, stimulates demand (thus affecting waste at the consumer level) and sets standards to the supply and the products (thus affecting food loss upstream). To precisely direct managerial intervention towards products with high waste-mitigation potential, the waste impact needs to be quantified. Previous studies measuring waste have examined individual metrics exclusive of each other, which affects the ranking of products. The present study proposes a method for prioritising waste based on combined monetary and environmental indicators, and it demonstrates the applicability of the method through empirical data from Scandinavian retail stores. The contribution of the proposed metric is that it results in a unique score comprising economic and environmental impacts for every single product, thus directing the managerial intervention more precisely. In addition, it enables choosing a weight for the economic and the environmental indicators, thus adding to the previous literature that looks at the products either through an economic or environmental perspective, exclusive of each other. Applying the method confirmed the previous research at a product group level that bread, meat and fruits/vegetables are the highest wasters. In addition, for some products, such as meat and fruit, the dependency between economic and environmental impacts is weaker, whereas it is stronger for others (e.g. bread and biscuits), thereby necessitating a method to gauge waste in both dimensions.

Integration of LCC and LCA results to higher system levels : The German meat and EU tomato cases

“…For these reasons, prioritizing meat waste reduction at the retail and consumption level would not only yield a significant GHG reduction, as shown in section 4.3, but also important savings in terms of economic and societal costs. This is confirmed by a recent research (Dreyer et al, 2019) proposing a combined environmental and monetary ranking method for the evaluation of food waste reduction priorities at the retail level.…”

Food Wastage as a Display of Consumer Behaviour

“…Food waste leads to environmental and social awareness. The environmental impacts for every single product are different, for example bread and confectionery makes the highest impact according to both carbon (CO2) and monetary impact, meat and dairy makes the second highest impact on the environment (Dreyer et al, 2019). Food waste and CO2 emissions are increasing.…”

Retail Food Waste: Existing Research and Research Gap

“…Organic waste was high in departmental level [6]. Though retail level food waste has received comparatively less attention [7], retail level food waste can be effectively reduced in the developed world [8]. The major source of producing food waste from retail level are: impairment of packaging, excess stocking, and over-preparing, these all are connected to the problem of the number of customers at the store [9].…”