Chermaine Cham Sue Hwee (FASS/ARS1), Koh Shue Lian, Erinna (FASS/ARS1), Priscilla Her Wan Yi (SDE/PFM1), Tan Shan Leong (FoE/MPE1), Tay Zhi Cong Johnathan (FoS/SCI1)
Academic Advisor: N. Sivasothi | Student Fellow: Nicholas Tan
We commenced our project by wanting to alleviate the food waste problem in Singapore. Singaporeans waste the equivalent of two rice bowls of food every day in a world where 1 in 9 people suffer from hunger. As such, our group aims to find out if popularising ordering options and monetary incentive would help to reduce rice wastage in our NUS canteen. We conducted multiple surveys and ground research to gather qualitative and quantitative results. In Semester 1, we found out that monetary incentive would encourage people to order less rice. (We assumed that when people to order less rice, less rice wastage would be incurred.) This semester, we pasted posters to raise awareness about food waste and the discount for the less rice option. Our study revealed an 18% increase in people ordering less rice largely due to an increase in awareness, which shows the viability of our hypothesis.
Keywords: Culture and Lifestyle Trends, Responsible Consumption, Waste Management, Food waste, Campaigns, Incentives