Development of a survey tool to determine the amount of food waste generated by restaurants, tourism and private households in South Tyrol

On the basis of the developed guidelines for the collection of data on food waste in South Tyrol in accordance with the EU reporting requirement, a basis for possible EU-compliant methods to be applied is now available. The methodological spectrum based on the EU requirements ranges from direct measurements, mass balances, questionnaires, coefficients and waste sorting analyzes. Particularly in the case of stages 1) restaurants and food services and 2) private households, the challenge is that the share of food waste can only be determined using complex methods, since food waste is mixed with other (non-food) waste and since the origin by industry cannot be determined directly. The aim of the project is to develop a survey tool for the efficient planning and evaluation of food waste analyses in restaurants, tourism and private households. This tool should allow for the efficient planning of weighing and sorting analyses of mixed municipal waste (residual waste) and bio-bin material, whereby the requirements for representativeness and sufficient, expected accuracy of the results should be met, while keeping the number and mass of samples as low as possible in terms of analysis costs. The expected result is an MS Excel ©-based survey tool that will enable the preliminary investigation (i.e. input of regional baseline data), the determination of the required sample mass and number of individual samples, the representative drawing of the individual samples, input or transfer of the analysis data and the evaluation.