A longitudinal analysis of the Impact of Food Waste Collections on Household Food Waste Arisings

This report investigates the impact of separate food waste collections on household food waste arisings across local authorities in the UK.

It achieves this by comparing the amount of food waste collected by local authorities before and after a food waste collection is put in place and using local authorities who haven’t changed their food waste collections as a ‘control group’. This helps determine whether there is a net prevention effect:  i.e., whether using a caddy and ‘seeing’ the quantity of food being thrown away helps householders to reduce their food waste; or whether this is outweighed by other effects (e.g. the legitimisation effect, where a food waste collection is seen by householders as normalising the act of disposing of food, leading to an increase in food waste).

The research helps with designing food-waste-collection systems and associated messaging to help prevent food waste, while also maximising diversion away from the residual waste stream.

Key findings

• This study suggests that separate food waste collections provide an important role in diverting food waste from the residual waste stream, so that it can be treated, for example in aerobic digestion.
• However, there is no evidence that these collections can achieve the potential secondary benefit of reducing household food waste by themselves.
• Therefore, testing and piloting of behavioural nudges and messaging is needed to help achieve these two goals: maximising food-waste diversion from the residual waste stream and also minimising the amount of food thrown away across all waste streams.

WRAP's local authority team have been working closely with Defra to provide key resources and guidance for local authorities as they look to introduce separate weekly food waste collections.  Our Service Change Implementation Planning Guide and Household Food Waste Collections Communications Guidance and Templates, are available for local authorities to use in preparation for the introduction of these new food waste collection services.

WRAP’s Service Change Implementation Planning Guide - Download
WRAP’s Household Food Waste Collections Communications Guidance and Templates - Download

Additional support is available to individual local authorities or groups of authorities working in partnership. Please contact us at [email protected] to find out how we can help you.