Food–Mobility–Waste Nexus: An Integrated Conceptual Framework for Environmental Sustainability
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Abstract
The rapid growth of global population, dietary demand and automobile use has exacerbated pressure on natural resource systems and environmental sustainability. Food loss and waste, and vehicular emissions are still contributing to growing environmental impact, and incoherent management and weak accountability in governance hinder effective problem-solving efforts. Food loss and waste and vehicular emissions, however, is often separately analysed, although they have received abundant investigation. This paper overcomes this fragmentation by conceptualizing the Food–Mobility–Waste Nexus: An Integrated Conceptual Framework for Environmental Sustainability.
The framework frames food waste and vehicle pollution as intertwined environmental stressors affecting a mobility-oriented food system. The work identifies numerous food system mobility interface categories, such as supply chain transport, food retail purchase mobility and food waste collection transport, and differentiates between resource loss and waste phase pollution and vehicle driven emissions. Behaviour, self control, accountability and governance & compliance act as cross cutting mechanisms and prevention, reduction, redistribution/reuse, recovery, circularity and resource efficiency as the sustainability response. Four conceptual propositions are produced as a way forward to future empirical research. The framework presents an overall approach which integrates aspects of the food systems, mobility, waste, pollution, human behaviour and institutions within a common system sustainability architecture.
By connecting what we eat, what we waste and how we move, the framework opens a new pathway for understanding and achieving environmental sustainability...
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