Our sustainability project is motivated by the belief that students’ lack of awareness on food waste is a major driver of excessive food waste at UCLA. Our stakeholder, Charles Wilcots, wants us to address this issue by furthering the research of previous SAR teams while still making our research differentiable and unique. Thus, our team intends on raising awareness of these issues, engaging students with these problems, and quantifying the decrease in the amount of waste created.
Throughout this project we will focus on education and outreach to inform students about consumer waste occurring at the UCLA Dining Commons, and conducting research on changes in students’ food waste behaviors. We will do food waste audits before our educational component. Our team then plans to conduct surveys in order to gain a better understanding of student knowledge about food waste. We also plan on hosting a focus group to gauge direct feedback with students, implementing informative signage with tips to reduce food waste, and creating an outreach event targeted at giving students a holistic understanding of food sustainability. After the educational aspect of our project during Winter quarter, we will perform an additional food waste audit and measure the quantitative impacts of our outreach initiatives. This aims to analyze whether food waste education does in fact have an impact on student’s dining behaviors.
Stakeholder: Charles Wilcots
Leaders: Helen Lu and Ariana Mamnoon
Members: Jacob Gerigk, Kelsey, Kathleen Jackson, Desmond Lim
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