Research to Reduce Consumer Food Waste in the United States Grants
EPA’s Science to Achieve Results Program (STAR) awarded $1,471,426 in total research grant funding to two institutions for research to develop, apply, and test innovative and creative community-engaged approaches to reduce household food waste in the United States.
Food waste is a major global environmental, social, and economic challenge. \When food is wasted, all the resources used to produce the food (water, energy, and fertilizers) along with the resources used to transport it from farms to our tables, are wasted. Reducing food waste could contribute to the prevention and reduction of air, water, and land pollution and help combat climate change.
The goals of these research grant awards are to improve the understanding of consumer benefits and barriers to prevention of food waste, demonstrate effectiveness of interventions to reduce household food waste, improve methods to engage communities in food waste prevention behaviors, increase sharing of replicable research-supported solutions, and ultimately identify methods to reduce food waste at the household level and its associated environmental impacts.
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Award: $739,381
Project Title: Culinary Home Empowerment for Food Waste Prevention and Minimization (CHEF-WPM)
Principal Investigator: Jonathan Deutsch
The research team will investigate a highly innovative and scalable approach to strengthen consumers’ motivation, opportunity, and ability to reduce food waste by adapting professional culinary education interventions to the home kitchen. The project team will develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a series of innovative food waste prevention and minimization culinary education videos (and supplementary materials) for home cooks. The videos will be developed by nationally renowned food preparers and food waste educators in collaboration with Drexel Food Lab. The team will hold a community-based education session with 100 selected households featuring eight educational culinary videos designed to empower consumers by providing the motivation, knowledge, and skills to reduce household food waste including meal planning, shopping, consuming, storing, and disposing. The project will measure the impacts of educational materials on food waste reduction at household and community levels and test national scalability and applicability.
View the research abstract for this project.
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill – Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Award: $732,045
Project Title: Preventing Consumer Food Waste: Developing and Evaluating Household-Level
Interventions
Principal Investigator: Lindsey Taillie
This project aims to evaluate a set of household food waste prevention interventions that researchers have developed with local health, food, and environmental organizations in North Carolina. The project team will enroll 200 low-income households in the Raleigh, NC, area to implement an intervention that is based on each household’s root causes of food waste. The team aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention by measuring the impacts on avoidable food waste (grams/household/week), food waste prevention behaviors, psychosocial drivers of food waste, and food security. The project will also simulate the impact of the interventions on environmental outcomes (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions, water use, land use, and energy use) and cost-effectiveness for national-scale application.
View the research abstract for this project.
Related Resources
• Learn more about these awards
• EPA Research Grants