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Research article2025Peer reviewedOpen access

Rethinking household food waste quantification: Increasing accuracy and reducing costs through automation

Sjölund, A.; Malefors, C.; Svensson, E.; von, Brömssen, C.; Eriksson, M.

Abstract

The amount of food waste generated in households constitutes an obstacle to achieving a sustainable food system. To assess food waste quantities and evaluate the effects of waste reduction actions, reliable quantification methodology is needed. This study compares a questionnaire method against a novel automated quantification tool as candidate methodologies. The automated quantification tool was deployed in 18 Swedish households, which also completed a questionnaire for four weeks. The findings revealed that the questionnaire, while less costly in a short-term perspective, captured 46 % of the waste recorded by the automated quantification tool. Thus, questionnaire-based methods appear to be too inaccurate to be used for quantifying food waste in households, especially households with high levels of food waste. However, the results offered promising evidence that technical solutions such as the automated quantification tool used in this study could be useful for providing reliable long-term quantification data which the ambitions of a sustainable food system necessitate.

Keywords

Automated quantification tool; Food systems; Household Food Waste Questionnaire; Questionnaire; Survey

Published in

Environmental technology & innovation
2025, volume: 37, article number: 103993

SLU Authors

UKÄ Subject classification

Environmental Management
Food Engineering

Publication identifier

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eti.2024.103993

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/139858