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

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. • Quantification accuracy and cost of two quantification methods were compared. • Questionnaire caught 46 % of the waste recorded by an automated quantification tool. • Questionnaire is less costly short-term but provides unreliable estimates. • Automated quantification tool is more cost efficient in a long-term perspective.