Sustainable Consumption and Production: Tackling Food Waste in the European Union (Dissertation Project)

Author: Magdalena Tanzer

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Helmut Breitmeier

In progress

The project focuses on the political regulation of food waste in the European Union (EU). One third of food produced for human consumption is wasted globally, which equals 1.3 billion tons every year. Entailing severe consequences on the ecological, economic and social dimension, the issue of food waste poses a major challenge for a sustainable transformation. The global community has responded by including the target of halving per capita food waste at the retail and consumer levels as part of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12. While the EU is a highly relevant actor for implementing the SDGs, research literature argues that it has long been bound to economic governance that hampers sustainable transformation. In this context, the dissertation project builds upon the call for new modes of governance for sustainable development. Accordingly, it provides an overview of EU regulation with regard to the field of food safety in order to derive conditions for an effective regulation aiming at the reduction of food waste.