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Diners waste far less food when they're schooled on the harm their leftovers can inflict on the environment. But if they know the food is going to be composted instead of dumped in a landfill, the educational benefit disappears.
When composting enters the picture, educated diners waste just as much as those who haven't learned about shrinking landfill space, dangerous greenhouse gas emissions and water and soil pollution, a new study found.
This presents a tricky situation for policymakers figuring out how to manage food waste, because the top tactics are prevention (through education) and diversion (through composting), said lead researcher Danyi Qi, a graduate student in agricultural economics at The Ohio State University.
"When you do both, they cancel each other out -- they work at cross purposes," said Qi, who is presenting the findings this week at the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations in Chicago.
The original article information is available on OSU's web site.
People don't feed their scraps to the dogs & hogs?
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Saturday January 07 2017, @02:05AM
Diners waste far less food when they're schooled on the harm their leftovers can inflict on the environment.
This is an example of paperclip optimization. The original example was of an AI eventually turning the entire universe of paperclips or things that make paperclips merely because that was what it was programmed to do. The idea is that in a world where there are many, often conflicting goals and interests, then optimizing for one thing is a bad idea.
Here, the researchers have decided that wasting food is the worst thing to happen at the dinner table and optimized accordingly. But the argument against such optimization is circular. If food wastage were that big a deal, it wouldn't be happening on the scale it happens on in the first place.
Meanwhile, the time of the diners who have to listen to an erroneous lecture is completely ignored.