CIP announces launch of a project looking at fighting food waste and funded by VELUX FONDEN

From September 2022, CIP will head a three-year interdisciplinary research project on food waste. The project is called Fighting food waste – Exploring the interplay between values, choices and habits and is funded by VELUX FONDEN’s HUMpraxis programme.

It is generally accepted that food waste should be reduced. Nevertheless, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, Denmark annually generates 814,000 tons of food waste. A considerable amount of this waste is generated at the end of the value chain, by consumers and in the retail sector – and in the interaction between them. Against this background, the project sets out to identify the barriers and opportunities that exist in fighting food waste in the spaces where consumers, the retail industry and food waste organizations interact.

The project is a collaboration between researchers from the Faculty of Humanities, the Faculty of Law and the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen and four key stakeholders in the fight against food waste: Forbrugerrådet Tænk, FødevareBanken, Stop Spild Lokalt and the Salling Group.

Through interdisciplinary research and working closely together with stakeholders in practice, the project aims to contribute to our understanding of food waste as a complex societal problem and to develop new initiatives in the fight against food waste.

Three of the participants on the project come from the Faculty of Humanities: Assistant Professor Kamilla Kraft from the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Languages, a postdoc from CIP and Associate Professor at CIP Janus Mortensen, who is also leading the project. Together, they will be looking to gain insights into the values different groups of consumers associate with food waste, the barriers they come up against when trying to reduce food waste and how they construct these experiences through language.

In collaboration with Forbrugerrådet Tænk and the other partners in the project, these analyses will be used as the basis for developing new initiatives to combat food waste, with the aim of describing the values, choices and habits of different groups of consumers.

From the Faculty of Law, Professor Jacob Graff Nielsen and postdoc Karin S. R. Rasmussen will contribute with analyses of current VAT and tax regulations and their impact on food waste.

Professor Jørgen Dejgaard Jensen from the Department of Food and Resource Economics at SCIENCE will also contribute with analyses detailing the economic barriers and opportunities that affect the redistribution of food, mainly from the retail sector.

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