Food waste handling perception in Indonesia: communicating the sustainability of Food and environment

Abstract

Every week, Indonesia discards approximately 10 million pieces of bread, cakes, and cookies, equating to 292,000 tons of CO2 emissions similar to Indonesia’s annual CO2 emissions. Due to a lack of resources and infrastructure, most impoverished countries rely on antiquated technologies such as anaerobic digestion (AD) to handle food waste. Bakery trash is a biologically formed organic waste that poses a serious threat to public health and the environment, including natural ecosystem contamination. The goal of this study is to find out how much effort Indonesians put into garbage management. How do they spread the word about leftovers through the media? How do they know about waste, particularly bread waste? As well as community-wide corrective steps to protect the environment from domestic food waste management. This study employs a quantitative approach. In order to send 100 questionnaires to persons in Indonesia, purposive sampling was used. Surveys are carried out using Google forms, which require a valid Google email address in order to ensure that each person only takes the survey once. The study’s conclusion is that food waste management efforts among Indonesians are hampered by the public’s lack of understanding of food waste management and disposal information in the media. The research sample understands the process of recycling food into pet food when it becomes garbage, according to their perceptions about the end process of food. In terms of food waste awareness, the majority of the participants in this study were aware that food waste is disposed of in landfills rather than being recycled.

Green Campaign of Food Waste Handling: Communicating the Food Sustainability

“…Meanwhile, almost 33% of respondents are already aware of the harm posed by food waste but have chosen to disregard the seriousness of the situation. This suggests that just 48 per cent of respondents are aware of the problem of food waste and , where the majority of Indonesian did not aware of the danger of Food waste [4]. The majority of Southeast Asian people being aware are dominated by Singaporeans (where more than 65% of the Singaporean respondents, are aware of the dangers of food waste into environmental).…”

“…Taking into consideration all available facts, it can be concluded that as the overall quantity of garbage created by each family type increases, so does the carbon footprint and the amount of revenue earned by each family home in Southeast Asia. In an effort to accelerate the awareness of Food Waste Recycling Management, the media plays the role of a game-changer and pressures the government to create policies related to food waste handling [4], [6]. Meanwhile, most of the respondents (61%) never got sufficient information from the media related to food waste handling (See Figure 3).…”

“…Several cities in Southeast Asia facing environmental problems related to food waste handling [4]. Like Jakarta, Manila, and Bangkok, the rapid growth of fast-food chain is related to the increase of leftover food [5].…”

“…Over half of the respondents to Liu et al's study frequently or occasionally wasted food due to a variety of causes while eating in, consuming ready-toeat meals, or dining out [5]. There are an estimated 292 000 tons of CO2 equivalent emissions from Indonesians' weekly consumption of bread, cake, and cookies in Indonesia [4].…”

“…In an effort to create awareness of the dangers of food waste, various communicative efforts are made to increase consumer awareness of the environment. Some of these methods are successful, but also some have not shown significant results [4], [6]. This study specifically evaluates which communication channels are effective according to the public perception of the Southeast Asian community in communicating the dangers and environmental awareness of the impact of food waste.…”