Environmentally friendly social changes: profiling individuals for household food waste reductions

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the ongoing challenge of management interventions seeking social change in pursuit of greater environmental sustainability. We seek to improve the segmentation of individuals to inform the design of customised interventions in the challenging and globally important area of reducing food waste. Given the limited explanatory power associated with socio-demographic characteristics in the segmentation process, we included a behavioural component based on the Stages of change model. Data was collected through an online survey completed by a representative sample of Australian adults (N = 944) who buy food for their household. Results show a large proportion of individuals (around 70%) are already actively involved in reducing food waste. We identified four meaningful clusters of individuals namely, Self-centred, Uninvolved, Concerned, and Passionate. Those in Concerned and Passionate clusters, which comprised 29% and 26% of the participants respectively, will benefit from interventions highlighting environmental impact. We contribute to literature by highlighting the benefits of incorporating stages of change with socio-demographics to create meaningful groups where enhanced impact can be achieved from customised interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Management interventions
• social change
• individual differences
• stages of change
• food waste
• Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

David Pearson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5374-7074

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant [DP130102820].