An integrated communication and behavioral design model for reducing food waste and sustaining pro-environmental behavior change

Abstract

Food waste at the retail consumption level is a sustainability problem created by repeated decisions about buying, storing, preparing, serving, eating, and disposing of food. While the communication process helps shape how an issue is understood and discussed, and social marketing provides an audience-focused planning process, behavioral insights and choice architecture provide tools that make decisions easier by changing information, decision structures, and forms of support. The current study integrates these three aspects under the umbrella of environmental communication, conceptualizing food waste prevention and reduction as both a communication and behavioral-design challenge. We propose a model with four main objectives to address this challenge: recognizing wasteful consumption, socially normalizing waste reduction, motivating practical action, and maintaining/recovering waste-reduction practices. These objectives address four common barriers: low issue awareness of the issue, low social support, limited ability to act, and unstable routines. Each objective is connected to relevant theories, food waste intervention strategies, and contextual factors. Factors such as package and portion sizes, storage space, time pressure, food-service design, date-labeling practices, available resources, and cultural norms can influence all four objectives. The model is nonlinear, as different situations may require varied starting points to best reflect fluctuating behavioral change and action stages. It contains nine conditional propositions and a cross-context research plan that can be tested in households and food-service settings across both higher- and lower-resource contexts. This work contributes a novel, practical framework that integrates existing theories and practices by overcoming food waste barriers through appropriate mechanisms and intervention tools across different practice contexts.