Reducing Plastic Packaging and Food Waste Through Product Innovation Simulation: Household Behavioural Insights Around Packaging, Single and Reuse Options, and Food: 2021-2022

This dataset was produced as part of the project: Reducing plastic packaging and food waste through product innovation simulation, funded by the NERC (Ref: NE/V010654/1). The wider project was concerned with building a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) model that can simulate food and food packaging as it moves through a household, from purchase to disposal. This dataset is qualitative in nature and was created to inform the modelling process. Remote qualitative interviews were planned and conducted, and participants were also asked to fill out entries on a research diary covering 4 days within a 7 day period. The interviews were semi-structured, and questions relating to waste and food practices were planned around 4 main areas: general household background, daily routines, weekly routines and shopping habits, waste and disposal practices, and attitudes to potential innovation in food packaging. A fifth section was based on photo-elicitation, to gauge participant attitudes to ageing produce. The diaries provided to participants had a system of prompts and questions that aimed to capture the movement of particular food items through the home and practices related to this movement over four separate days. Image files could also be submitted by participants, either included in the text files or as email attachments to the researcher. Follow up interviews were planned, which would be conducted after the second diary entry was complete and returned, but time constraints meant that only one follow up interview was conducted. A screening questionnaire was used to recruit and select participants, which was disseminated through university research recruitment channels and through social media accounts set up for the project. Informed consent for this questionnaire was gained at that stage, but was also gained prior to the remote interview, for both the interview and the diary research. However, the questionnaire data was not analysed and is not included in the collection as it was for recruitment purposes only. The data collection is comprised of 28 interview transcripts, 25 completed research diaries and 91 image files (produced by research participants) as part of the research diaries. Where image files were included in text documents by participants, the image files have been extracted and saved as photographs separately. These are stored as .docx files and .tiff files accordingly. Each of these was anonymised according to the anonymization plan. As there are multiple forms of data for each participant, each participant that completed the questionnaire was given a unique identifier, with suffixes describing the type of data. These are described in the readme file for the data collection.