Conference Agenda

For at least the last decade, food waste has a been a growing concern for policymakers in OECD countrie. One policy emphasized for addressing food waste challenges and their associated environmental impacts is the expansion of municipal composting services. Important economic feedbacks may confound the predicted impacts of policy-induced composting service expansion on food waste generation. One key feedback is behaviorally analogous to the ‘rebound effect’ studied in the energy efficiency literature: To the extent that households face ethical or moral costs from throwing away food with the rest of their trash, composting offers a means to feel less bad about throwing away food. In this paper, we analyze data from a recent largescale household survey conducted by the OECD across nine countries (N = 8,569), to study the effects of composting services on food waste generation behavior. The survey focused on eliciting a variety of household behaviors and attitudes across several environmental domains, including waste generation, separation of recyclables, and composting. Using clustered matching and instrumental variable metthods, we estimate the effect of curbside composting on food waste behavior and then translate them into volumetric terms using an auxiliary regression of non-composting households’ mixed waste volume on their food waste behaviors. We find that curbside composting significantly increases the propensity with which households throw away food. From the auxiliary volumetric regression, we reckon this effect translates into an average treatment effect on treated households of a +1.3% increase in food waste volume in response to curbside composting service. Our results indicate that there may be a modest increase in food waste when it is easier for households to compost. Policymakers should be aware of this rebound effect on overall waste volumes.