Current Projects

Through chemistry and materials science, we will exploit valuable food waste streams as feed-stocks to produce high value materials and generate new packaging materials for long-term food storage.

The valorization cluster and modeling clusters will identify opportunities for materials chemistry.

This project will review existing ontologies relevant to food waste data and generate an ontology that facilitates data interoperability for data collected to document wasted food and to support food waste reduction efforts.

Interdisciplinary groups that might use the data will be involved in developing the ontology.

This project will create a novel integrated system assessment approach by integrating life cycle, system dynamic, and health statistical assessment, providing foundational knowledge about effective strategies maximizing societal benefits of food donation, such as increasing food access and security of socially disadvantaged population groups, reducing food waste, and improving environmental sustainability of food rescue systems.

Integration across environmental engineering, system modeling, health and social behavioral, and policy sciences.

This project will work with DC community groups including Ward 7 Faith-Based Organizations, DC Public Schools, and community members to evaluate the impact of tailored interventions (particularly various drivers of health) on levels of household food waste.

Health science researchers partnering with ethnographic researchers to conduct focus groups.

This project will examine choices and values by government actors at different scales to understand how food waste policies are being designed, reported, implemented, and assessed in order to find a scalable decision support tool that informs how policies and infrastructure may be more successful.

Working with collaborators in policy, biology, environmental engineering, and industrial design expertise.

The goal of this project is to understand how, if at all, policymakers and researchers have discussed and assessed policies historically that create wasted foods today. This work will reveal how wasted food has long historical developments that alter our current thoughts of this challenge as new. The work could re-frame current policy discourse around wasted food.

Bringing together economics, geography, public health, and nutrition. We are using different data, the text of speeches, and different methods, textual analysis, to develop new knowledge and ways of knowing of the how policy may shape wasted food.

This project will work with community organizations in Chicago’s food loss and waste landscape to help identify priorities in order to scale food waste solutions.

Attracting new stakeholders to develop strategies for more effectively coordinating efforts for food loss/waste prevention/rescue/reuse and build educational activities.

This project will conduct a comparative assessment, using life cycle assessment and techno-economic analysis, of at least two options for digestate management to help inform decision-making for technology deployment in relation to policies pushing for increased organic waste diversion.

UC Davis and RIT valorization groups collaborating.

The group will seek to understand the approaches to evaluating and minimizing the potential for biases during the collection of data concerning the food system to ensure that modeling based upon fully supports diversity, equity, inclusivity and justice efforts.

Researchers from data science, DCI, engineering, and environmental policy working together.

This project will develop an evaluation of interventions implemented by multiple local governments through the NRDC Food Matters Program. It will seek to understand intervention impacts across different local government typology settings, and gain insights to support adapting to context. The current iteration of the evaluation plan involves using semistructured interviews and reported data from participating cities to characterize impacts of the Food Matters interventions on a) executive leadership activities, b) provision of incentives or technical assistance, c) public engagement and d) data collection or analysis of food rescue activities.

The plan will be co-developed in partnership between RECIPES researchers and NRDC staff. After the team defines the purpose further, but before the project is fully established, they will open the invitation more broadly for RECIPES collaboration, to advance further convergence.

The purpose of this study is to implement and evaluate an employee-engaged cohort model focused on improving food donation in Albertsons-banner grocery stores. Through this process, the cohort will create prototypes that will be tested in four stores in the Mid-Atlantic division.

Public Health
Social design (Human-centered design)
Anthropology

This ongoing project will estimate the source of irrigation water by crop, producing a high-resolution understanding of how water is used in our food supply chains and the long-term risks that unsustainable water use poses for food supply chains.

Convergence of hydrology, land use, and supply chains disciplines.

There are two existing models, DrFEWS, which is a CGE, and US-FEAST, which is a partial equilibrium model. This project will investigate methods of incorporating waste in both models.

Convergence of economics, mathematics, and engineering through combining two different modeling techniques.

This project will incorporate new metrics for resilience and equity within models of food systems and wasted food. It will also develop mechanisms for quantifying tradeoffs within existing and new models.

There are four faculty from different disciplines and modeling backgrounds seeking to create new common knowledge around metrics in modeling. The modeling can also be applied to different scenarios and topics.

This project is a new modeling paradigm that captures regional food system interactions and that has explicit process representation and accounts for marginal changes as a result of decisions by integrating the process representation of optimization models, the aggregation of IO models, and the marginal, nonlinear representation of equilibrium models. LCA is then integrated into this framework, filling the need for consequential models of circular economy solutions.

This project produces new common knowledge in the modeling space that can advance modeling of regional systems through new methods by combining different strengths of modeling frameworks into one modeling paradigm.

This ongoing project is a means of tracking the amount of household food waste created in the US. It will permit assessment of national changes to levels of household food waste necessary to evaluate if national goals are being met for this part of the food value chain.

Working with a broad array of researchers and stakeholders to implement additional questions on the survey that can provide insights into boundary-spanning issues.

This project will develop a cooking curriculum that simultaneously promotes healthy eating and reduces food waste in low-income/low-resource households.

This project will survey vendors and gleaning partners to ascertain what barriers they currently face in connecting excess food to interested gleaners and inform possibilities for increasing food gleaning in Washington, DC.

This project aims to synthesize the role that transportation plays in both the creation and reduction of food waste.

This project will explore the interactions among food waste and plastic waste. Objectives include quantifying and characterizing the packaging and other food contaminants associated with food purchase, prep, and disposal, the abundance of contamination in common valorization outputs such as anaerobic digesters and composting facilities, and the ultimate role of wasted food as a vehicle to transport microplastic to the environment.

Integration of plastic tracking into waste tracking technologies.

This project will create the first regional system typology framework specific to wasted food, in contexts across urban-rural dimensions, socioeconomic status, population size, infrastructure age, and governance.

Interdisciplinary research across public health, modeling, engineering, and economics.

This project will introduce a new modeling structure integrating life-cycle analysis and optimization problems to quantify the environmental impacts caused by wasted food on our food system and assess new policies.

Integrating connections with economics, engineering, and policy analyses and researchers.

This review is intended to identify knowledge gaps to better enable the design and implementation of valorization technologies able to manage wasted food that cannot be minimized or managed in other ways.

Collaborations across four (+) universities and between students and faculty in varied disciplines (engineering, sustainability, chemistry, ecology, policy, business, design).

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the utility of an app-based method for quantifying food waste in controlled conditions, as well as free living conditions. The app is designed to quantify food waste that occurs when food is prepared, eaten, and discarded when refrigerators and cabinets are cleaned out. The app also determines the disposition of food waste or where the waste goes (e.g., fed to pets, garbage/landfill, sink disposal, compost bin, etc.). Finally, the app quantifies food purchases as well, allowing us to evaluate if pricing and/or healthfulness in which food is acquired (e.g., buying things in bulk) is associated with waste. The app and associated methodology have other applications and we are eager to overcome the limitations of the method, which primarily revolved around scalability. We are pursuing technology (e.g., semi-automated computer imaging) to do so.

Computing and AI

This project will support schools as they conduct food waste audits, report measurements, and implement food waste interventions over the course of two academic years and help reduce food waste and insecurity, and to a much larger degree in marginalized communities.

Working with collaborators in education, nutrition, and non-profit sectors.