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Consumers discard a lot more food than widely believed: Estimates of global food waste using an energy gap approach and affluence elasticity of food waste

This work provides an internationally comparable consumer food waste dataset based on food availability, energy gap and consumer affluence. Such data can be used for constructing meaningful and internationally comparable metrics on food waste, such as those for Sustainable Development Goal 12. The d...

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Autores principales: Verma, Monika van den Bos, de Vreede, Linda, Achterbosch, Thom, Rutten, Martine M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7015318/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32049964
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228369
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author Verma, Monika van den Bos
de Vreede, Linda
Achterbosch, Thom
Rutten, Martine M.
author_facet Verma, Monika van den Bos
de Vreede, Linda
Achterbosch, Thom
Rutten, Martine M.
author_sort Verma, Monika van den Bos
collection PubMed
description This work provides an internationally comparable consumer food waste dataset based on food availability, energy gap and consumer affluence. Such data can be used for constructing meaningful and internationally comparable metrics on food waste, such as those for Sustainable Development Goal 12. The data suggests that consumer food waste follows a linear-log relationship with consumer affluence and starts to emerge when consumers reach a threshold of approximately $6.70/day/capita level of expenditure. These findings also imply that most empirical models overestimate consumption by not accounting for the possibility of food waste in their analysis. The results also show that the most widely cited global estimate of food waste is underestimated by a factor greater than 2 (214 Kcal/day/capita versus 527 Kcal/day/capita). Comparison with estimates of US consumer food waste based on national survey data shows this approach can reasonably reproduce the results without needing extensive data from national surveys.
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spelling pubmed-70153182020-02-21 Consumers discard a lot more food than widely believed: Estimates of global food waste using an energy gap approach and affluence elasticity of food waste Verma, Monika van den Bos de Vreede, Linda Achterbosch, Thom Rutten, Martine M. PLoS One Research Article This work provides an internationally comparable consumer food waste dataset based on food availability, energy gap and consumer affluence. Such data can be used for constructing meaningful and internationally comparable metrics on food waste, such as those for Sustainable Development Goal 12. The data suggests that consumer food waste follows a linear-log relationship with consumer affluence and starts to emerge when consumers reach a threshold of approximately $6.70/day/capita level of expenditure. These findings also imply that most empirical models overestimate consumption by not accounting for the possibility of food waste in their analysis. The results also show that the most widely cited global estimate of food waste is underestimated by a factor greater than 2 (214 Kcal/day/capita versus 527 Kcal/day/capita). Comparison with estimates of US consumer food waste based on national survey data shows this approach can reasonably reproduce the results without needing extensive data from national surveys. Public Library of Science 2020-02-12 /pmc/articles/PMC7015318/ /pubmed/32049964 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228369 Text en © 2020 Verma et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 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 author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Verma, Monika van den Bos
de Vreede, Linda
Achterbosch, Thom
Rutten, Martine M.
Consumers discard a lot more food than widely believed: Estimates of global food waste using an energy gap approach and affluence elasticity of food waste
title Consumers discard a lot more food than widely believed: Estimates of global food waste using an energy gap approach and affluence elasticity of food waste
title_full Consumers discard a lot more food than widely believed: Estimates of global food waste using an energy gap approach and affluence elasticity of food waste
title_fullStr Consumers discard a lot more food than widely believed: Estimates of global food waste using an energy gap approach and affluence elasticity of food waste
title_full_unstemmed Consumers discard a lot more food than widely believed: Estimates of global food waste using an energy gap approach and affluence elasticity of food waste
title_short Consumers discard a lot more food than widely believed: Estimates of global food waste using an energy gap approach and affluence elasticity of food waste
title_sort consumers discard a lot more food than widely believed: estimates of global food waste using an energy gap approach and affluence elasticity of food waste
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7015318/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32049964
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228369
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