Two key ways to manage food waste — educating people about it and composting it — seem to work at odds, Marion Renault wrote last week in the Columbus Dispatch, reporting on research by CFAES’s Danyi Qi and Brian Roe.
That is, the researchers found, people will waste more food if they know it will be composted — by, say, the restaurant that served it. But they’ll waste less if they know about such issues as filled-up landfills and the harmful methane dumped food waste puts in the air.
The challenge, Qi said in the story, is to get the two methods — education and composting — working not in conflict but in harmony. Read the story.