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Towards integrating production and consumption to reduce consumer food waste in developed countries.pdf (2.08 MB)

Towards integrating production and consumption to reduce consumer food waste in developed countries

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-01-05, 14:52 authored by Aicha Jellil, Elliot WoolleyElliot Woolley, Shahin RahimifardShahin Rahimifard
Literature analysing reasons for Consumer Food Waste (CFW) revealed that it cannot be reduced to individual consumer behaviour alone. In fact, CFW should not be conceptualised as the problem but as a symptom of a food system that oversupplies and encourages consumerism. This research focuses on preventing CFW generated in the United Kingdom (UK), as a representative of a developed country, by improving the traditional food provisioning system to better integrate production and consumption. To achieve this, five stages are identified to design a sustainable product service system (PSS) capable of supporting consumers to better manage their food operations. These are: (1) strategic analysis of current food provisioning system, (2) exploring system level innovations leading to significant minimisation of CFW, (3) refinement and selection of PSS, (4) designing the most promising PSS concept from an environmental, economic and social perspective, and (5) evaluating designed PSS against current food provisioning system. This paper considers the first of these stages, reviews reasons for and existing solutions to CFW, and provides a strategic analysis of the current food provisioning system to identify characteristics that could be exploited within a new PSS to reduce CFW. Initial investigations reveal applicability of PSS concept to the food provisioning system and potential for considerable reduction of CFW if core causes are adequately addressed.

Funding

This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) UK under Grant [number EP/K030957/1].

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

International Journal of Sustainable Engineering

Citation

JELLIL, A., WOOLLEY, E. and RAHIMIFARD, S., 2018. Towards integrating production and consumption to reduce consumer food waste in developed countries. International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, 11(5), pp. 294-306.

Publisher

© The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-12-18

Publication date

2018

Notes

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ISSN

1939-7038

eISSN

1939-7046

Language

  • en

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