Review Reports - Understanding Food Waste Produced by University Students: A Social Practice Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Method - It is stated that garbology is used to 'determine the actual amount of food waste' however I don't see this any quantification of the results.

There is no mention of ethical approval of the study in the method which I would have expected and especially if it had an element of deception. Please add. I see it at the end of the paper.

It would be interesting to know how long compostable food waste collection has been available in Christchurch and how it is promoted to provide some context for adopting food composting behaviours. Were the students local or from other places that did not have food composting therefore may be more unfamiliar with it.

It states that use-by dates were checked in fridges - was this recorded or just observed? And therefore how was this assessed in the findings?

Findings - The paragraph under Table 1 (no line numbers) and Figure 1 is perhaps more suitably placed in the method. I think at the start of the findings you need to state that you are combining and reporting the results of the various methods used to collect data together to alert the reader at the beginning as to how the results are reported.

L4 I would suggest that 13 out of 19 participants were using a list which I suggest was admirable for university students rather than being described as 'only'. This was later described as 'few participants' (L314) when it was 68% of participants therefore I would suggest some rewording of this. How does this compare numerically to other studies?

Suggest quotes are placed in italics to show they are quotes from participants rather than text e.g. L58-59. The quoting of words or shorter phrases from participants within sentences was well done; however, the more extended quotes needed to be more identifiable as quotes e.g. L26-29.

I also noted quoting considerable quoting of literature in the results which I suggest is placed in the discussion.

L62 - replace spilt with split

Implications

L414-426 The marketing of less perfect food is currently done by Countdown in New Zealand under the brand 'The Odd Bunch' which could be included here as an example. Also, I wondered about the role of student associations in promoting waste reduction as a way to protect the planet to students say at times like Orientation Week perhaps as a joint initiative with the local Regional Council especially for out of town students.

Author Response

Thank you to the review team for their time and expertise in reviewing our work. We have endeavoured to address all the concerns that have been raised, and feel your suggestions have substantially improved the paper.

Reviewer 1 Comment

Method - It is stated that garbology is used to 'determine the actual amount of food waste' however I don't see this any quantification of the results.

Our Response

Thank you for pointing out this oversight. We have now stated that the garbology allowed us to determine the composition of the food waste. We have also adjusted this in one other spot in the paper.

Reviewer 1 Comment

There is no mention of ethical approval of the study in the method which I would have expected and especially if it had an element of deception. Please add. I see it at the end of the paper.

Our Response

We have now added: “The study received ethical approval from a review board at the University.”

Reviewer 1 Comment

Our Response

We have added. The three-bin waste system came into effect in 2009 with the Christchurch City Council Waste Management Bylaw (Christchurch City Council, 2009). The use of the system is communicated on the council website, through videos, a booklet provided in 13 languages, the Bin Good app, transit advertising and periodic direct mail to residents.

We have added an additional limitation: “Finally, we did not record whether students were from Christchurch, so we could not determine whether they were familiar with curbside composting. Thus, future research might compare students who were familiar with curbside recycling with those who were not to determine how this impacts their food waste practices.”

Reviewer 1 Comment

It states that use-by dates were checked in fridges - was this recorded or just observed? And therefore how was this assessed in the findings?

Our Response

We have now provided clarification here, we state: “Items were checked in terms of whether they had passed their best-before or use-by dates, and this information was recorded for dairy items and condiments, and participants were questioned about items, such as leftovers found in the fridge.”

Reviewer 1 Comment

Our response

Thank you for this suggestion, we have now moved this paragraph to the methods section.

We have now added a statement to guide the reader: “In order to present our findings, we combine the results from the various methods used to collect data, and discuss our findings according to the practices of planning, shopping, cooking, storing and assessing edibility, and disposal.”

Reviewer 1 Comment

Our response

Our apologies, we may have confused you. We state that 13 of 19 plan their meals (“Only 13 of the 19 participants stated that they put in effort to plan their meals or to plan before shopping.”) and then we talk about the use of lists (“In terms of other planning rules, ten participants stated that they never took a list to the supermarket. Only two indicated they regularly use a list (10.5%) and seven (36.8%) said they sometimes use a list (see Table 2), so less than half (47.4%) of our participants use lists.”)

We have also added in the discussion section, I comparison to past research. “This is less than previous research by Di Talia and colleagues (2019) who found that 28% of respondents regularly use lists.”

Reviewer 1 Comment

Our response

Thank you for this suggestion. We have now italicised the quotes to distinguish them from the text.

Reviewer 1 Comment

I also noted quoting considerable quoting of literature in the results which I suggest is placed in the discussion.

Our response

Thank you for this suggestion. On reflection, we feel this is a stylistic difference between the approach taken by the authors and the preference of this reviewer. We have always, when reporting on qualitative results, included the relevant literature to link our findings to the literature. While Sustainability is a multi-disciplinary journal, the style we have adopted in this manuscript is entirely consistent with our own discipline area (i.e., marketing; and within that, consumer behaviour). This is also a common practice in qualitative papers published in pre-eminent marketing journals, such as the Journal of Consumer Research.

Reviewer 1 Comment

L62 - replace spilt with split

Our response

We have now corrected this.

Reviewer 1 Comment

Implications

Our Response

We have now added this example in the implications section. And we have also added this implication “Policy makers could also partner directly with Universities or bodies who represent students (e.g., student associations) to educate students on local recycling and composting initiatives and waste reduction behaviours.”

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments

Manuscript Number: sustainability-1849194

Title: Understanding food waste produced by university students: A social practice approach

In this study, a social practice theory was applied to explore food waste produced by university students living in shared apartments. A qualitative technique was used including observation, fridge ethnography, garbology and qualitative interviews. It is one of excellent analysis that a considerable number of avoidable foods, such as fresh foods and leftovers, were wasted by students and not properly disposed of in curbside composting bins.

This work is interesting, which is a significant advancement over existing knowledge, and off very applied nature, it can be accepted for publication, but it also needs substantial improvements before considering for publication.

# Abstract: include more quantitative data in this section

# The authors focus more on the novelty of the work in introduction section

# There are several typographical and grammatical mistakes which should be corrected. English must be improved.

# Aims and object, please clearly indicate the main points undertaken in aims and objective section

# the abbreviation used must be explained on their first appearance, or provide separate list of abbreviations

# 2. Literature Review should be 2. Literature survey

# (Stancu et al., 2016, Stefan et al., 2013). Formatting of ref must be same throughout

# in methods section, please include the information about the statistics applied

# please support your statements in discussion section with relevant references

# add future prospects of the study in the conclusion section

# References are not uniform, please revise, update according to journal format

# The introduction and result and discussion part should be improved and the results should be interpreted with latest references to make it more understandable for the readers, cite more latest studies related to topic under investigation

Author Response

Reviewer 2 Comment

# Abstract: include more quantitative data in this section

Our Response

As the abstract indicates, we have only collected qualitative data, and do not have quantitative data to report.

Reviewer 2 Comment

# The authors focus more on the novelty of the work in introduction section

Our response

We have now stated in the introduction: “The main objective of this study is to determine the practices that lead to food waste among university students. We explore these practices in the unique context in which many university students live, the shared apartment. We use a variety of qualitative methods to determine what sorts of food are wasted and whether this food is being properly disposed of (i.e., composted). We respond to multiple calls for more research including identifying the categories of household food waste, focusing on curbside composting, and utilizing a multi-method approach to provide a more nuanced account of how and why food gets wasted by university students.”

Reviewer 2 Comment

# There are several typographical and grammatical mistakes which should be corrected. English must be improved.

Our response

We have carefully reviewed and recrafted the manuscript to enhance the readability of the paper.

Reviewer 2 Comment

# Aims and object, please clearly indicate the main points undertaken in aims and objective section

Our Response

Thank you. We have tried to more clearly state our research objective. We now indicate, “The main objective of this study is to determine the practices that lead to food waste among university students living in shared apartments.”

Reviewer 2 Comment

# the abbreviation used must be explained on their first appearance, or provide separate list of abbreviations

Our response

The only abbreviation we use is SPT, “Specifically, these approaches adopt the lens of social practice theory (SPT)”, which we define on the first appearance. If there are other instances we have overlooked, we are happy to change these.

# 2. Literature Review should be 2. Literature survey

Our response

We have now changed this to “Literature survey”.

Reviewer 2 Comment

# (Stancu et al., 2016, Stefan et al., 2013). Formatting of ref must be same throughout

Our Response

We have now corrected these.

Reviewer 2 Comment

# in methods section, please include the information about the statistics applied

Our response

As stated in the abstract and the methods, we have only collected qualitative data and descriptive statistics that we can quantify (e.g., how often they shop, use a list, share meals, etc.). However, we cannot apply statistical techniques beyond counts to this data.

Reviewer 2 Comment

# please support your statements in discussion section with relevant references

Our response

We have now substantially reworked the discussion section to bring in many more cites and base our discussion on the relevant and current literature. We have added almost 20 cites to the paper.

Reviewer 2 Comment

# add future prospects of the study in the conclusion section

Our response

We are not sure what the reviewer is asking for with this question. Can you please clarify? We have certainly already provided a large number of future research directions that arise from our work.

Reviewer 2 Comment

# References are not uniform, please revise, update according to journal format

Our response

The references have now been converted to a numbered list as per the journal format, and will be changed in the text if the paper is accepted.

Reviewer 2 Comment

Our response

The introduction has now been updated with many additional references, all published in the last two years, to better situate our work in the latest research in the field. We have also interpreted the results in the discussion section with the latest references. Thank you for this suggestion.