Behavioural design for reducing household food waste in collaboration with the public sector

If Sweden is to achieve its objective of reducing food waste by 25% before 2025, urgent action is required to address food waste in households, where most of the waste is produced.

However, several knowledge gaps impede the implementation of effective interventions aimed at reducing household food waste.

Interventions are rarely tested in real world settings, are seldom informed by behavioual science and their outcomes are typically not objectively evaluated.

This project aims to address these knowledge gaps by applying a novel approach to co-designing and testing household interventions for reducing food waste.

We will combine a model of behaviour, the COM-B model with a service design approach to identify behavioural drivers of food waste and techniques for shifting household behaviour.

Interventions applying these behaviour change techniques will be co-designed together with households and our project partner, Göteborgsregionen (GR).

Interventions will be tested in a sample of 40 households during eight weeks and intervention effects will be evaluated by actual household food waste using state-of-the-art smart bins and compared with a control group.

By embedding a public sector partner alongside households in the research and co-design process, the outcomes of the project, as well as the behavioural design process itself, are likely to be implementable and scalable across the Swedish public sector.