Food Waste Management: Perceptions, Decisions, and Actions
This student thesis (PDF), from the Department of Earth Sciences at Uppsala University, aims to explore the attitudes towards food waste in Guatemala by focusing on the restaurant sector. Around 6% of the global food loss occurs in Latin America. However, the region lacks a clear strategy to address the issue, which is also true at the national level for countries such as Guatemala. Furthermore, the perception of different actors in the country towards food waste and its management remains unknown. Therefore, a case study was conducted, involving the participation of three restaurant owners and one official from the Municipality of Guatemala City. The results showed varied perceptions from the actors on the categorization of food waste, although impacts on economic, environmental, and social dimensions were acknowledged by all of them; with the social dimension most prominent. For the actors, the generation of food waste was significant at the customer level, but was also influenced by the type of service provided by the restaurants. Additionally, the approaches selected by them to manage food waste covered a vast range of actions, like food surplus donation and strategies arranged with their ingredients suppliers. The actors seem to favor economic incentives to address and motivate food waste management. Nevertheless, they see other options and incentives as viable, such as the creation of policies by the restaurants, awareness campaigns, and side-business opportunities by composting.