Food waste in Japan: Trends, current practices and key challenges

Liu, Chen; Hotta, Yasuhiko; Santo, Atsushi; Hengesbaugh, Matthew; Watabe, Atsushi; Totoki, Yoshiaki; Allen, Desmond; Bengtsson, Magnus

doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.06.026

Cited by 107 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…However, an important consideration for these programs is ensuring that the quality of donated products remains high since many of these products tend to be unsold or of lower-quality. Similarly, other policies that could be implemented include those used in Japan's Food Waste Recycling Law, enacted in 2001 [41]. These laws target food waste generated by food suppliers and require them to recycle as appropriate.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Is Missing in Food Loss and Waste Analyses? A Close Look at Fruit and Vegetable Wholesale Markets

2019

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Food loss and waste (FLW) has been the subject of significant research, with recent empirical evidence analyzing the determinants of FLW in many different countries. Much of this literature examines FLW at the farm, food processing, and consumer level. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study thus far has addressed this issue at food wholesale markets. This paper fills this knowledge gap by examining food loss at fruit and vegetable wholesale markets. Using a dataset with individual auction transactions from Taiwan, we examine the extent to which average daily market prices, product quality, and disaster shocks are associated with food loss. Results point to a negative effect of daily market prices on food loss. Furthermore, disaster shocks can lead to greater food loss, particularly typhoons. These effects are heterogeneous across the distribution for the weight of food loss.Research has also examined the extent of food losses at different stages of the food supply chain. At the farm production level, food losses range from 20 to 40 percent for meat, dairy, cereal, and vegetable products [15][16][17]. These production losses occur when agricultural shocks such as weather conditions prevent crops from being harvested, or when produce is "graded out" based on quality [16]. Other literature has examined post-harvest losses of crops such as maize and sweet potato due to poor management skills and market mismatches [18,19].However, despite this extensive research, no studies have been done on FLW at wholesale markets. There are two primary reasons to believe that FLW can be a severe problem at this stage in the food supply chain. First, many wholesale markets are unplanned urban spaces with no special facilities. Thus, these markets often lack even a single refrigeration unit for their products, particularly cold storage systems that can preserve and store goods for extended periods. Second, the auction system that typically governs wholesale markets can also generate FLW. Since consumers bid on both the quality and quantity of items, this means that products can be left unsold. Wholesale markets facilitate FLW because they have the unique cost of clearing their inventory of perishable products at the end of the business day. This clearance is done to ensure that there is adequate space for the following day's auction items.This paper quantifies the determinants and extent of food loss for wholesale markets using a case study in Taiwan as an illustration. Using a large-scale dataset of individual transactions from a fruit and vegetable wholesale market, we estimate the weight of food loss using the ordinary least squares and quantile regression models. Results show that average market prices are negatively associated with the weight of fruit and vegetable food loss. Compared to high-quality grades of fresh fruits and vegetables, low-quality products are less likely to be sold within the auction market. Regarding the sourcing of agricultural products, we find that fresh fruits and vegetables provided by farmer'...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Is Missing in Food Loss and Waste Analyses? A Close Look at Fruit and Vegetable Wholesale Markets

2019

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“…Cases of Japan (Liu et al. ) and Korea (Park and Lah ) may hence be relevant to this situation. The collected feedstock can then always produce non‐negative net profit, and the guaranteed profit level

Z (x; β_{1}, β_{2})

can be determined by just evaluating the case with fixed

v \equiv v^{-} false(β_{1} false)

, when waste volume v is lowest, by solving an LP.…”

Section: Analyzing Robustness Of Resource Recovery Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robustness of Resource Recovery Systems under Feedstock Uncertainty

Wang

2019

Production and Operations Management

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Recovery of resources from waste streams present important opportunities in mitigating environmental and energy challenges in many countries. In this paper, we develop an optimization‐based approach to study the robustness of resource recovery systems in achieving economic feasibility under feedstock uncertainty. Two key characteristics of the feedstock that influence recovery performance are its volume and composition. We propose models of feedstock robustness functions to perform robustness analysis with respect to these two characteristics, and also propose a composite robustness index as the optimization criterion for the problem of technology and capacity planning of recovery systems. We show that the proposed models have computationally attractive reformulations for the robustness analysis and optimization problems. In particular, the robustness analysis model solves either a small number of linear programs in several special cases, or a small number of linear mixed integer programs in general. Correspondingly, the design optimization problem can be solved either via the solution of a small number of linear mixed integer programs, or via a cutting plane approach. Finally, we demonstrate, through some numerical studies, the insights and values of using the proposed models in evaluation and optimization of organic waste‐to‐energy recovery systems.

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“…The main aim of this study was to determine the optimum new pre-processing facilities locations and transportation network capacity growth. Liu et al (2016) critically analyzed the macro-level trends of food waste in Japan from 1960-2012 for additional prevention and mitigation of food waste. In this analysis, they have determined the mismatch between calorie/protein supply and consumption, elucidated the present status of waste in Japanese food supply chain and recommended the policies.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An MINLP model to support the movement and storage decisions of the Indian food grain supply chain

Mogale

Kumar

Tiwari

2018

Control Engineering Practice

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2018. An MINLP model to support the movement and storage decisions of the Indian food grain supply chain. Control Engineering Practice 70 , pp. Abstract:This paper addresses the novel three stage food grain distribution problem of Public Distribution System (PDS) in India which comprises of farmers, procurement centers, base silos and field silos. The Indian food grain supply chain consists of various activities such as procurement, storage, transportation and distribution of food grain. In order to curb transportation and storage losses of food grain, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) is moving towards the modernized bulk food grain supply chain system. This paper develops a Mixed Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) model for planning the movement and storage of food grain from surplus states to deficit states considering the seasonal procurement, silo capacity, demand satisfaction and vehicle capacity constraints. The objective function of the model seeks to minimize the bulk food grain transportation, inventory holding, and operational cost. Therein, shipment cost contains the fixed and variable cost, inventory holding and operational cost considered at the procurement centers and base silos. The developed mathematical model is computationally complex in nature due to nonlinearity, the presence of numerous binary and integer variables along with a huge number of constraints, thus, it is very difficult to solve it using exact methods. Therefore, recently developed, Hybrid Particle-Chemical Reaction Optimization (HP-CRO) algorithm has been employed to solve the MINLP model. Different problem instances with growing complexities are solved using HP-CRO and the results are compared with basic Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms. The results of computational experiments illustrate that the HP-CRO algorithm is competent enough to obtain the better quality solutions within reasonable computational time.

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Food waste in Japan: Trends, current practices and key challenges

Cited by 107 publications

References 11 publications

What Is Missing in Food Loss and Waste Analyses? A Close Look at Fruit and Vegetable Wholesale Markets

What Is Missing in Food Loss and Waste Analyses? A Close Look at Fruit and Vegetable Wholesale Markets

Robustness of Resource Recovery Systems under Feedstock Uncertainty

An MINLP model to support the movement and storage decisions of the Indian food grain supply chain

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