I completed my PhD at Monash University (Melbourne) remotly from my home office on the Gold Coast between 2020 and 2023. The title of my PhD was ‘Auditing aggregate food waste in hospital food services and diverting it from landfill’. We completed 2 systematic reviews (two publications) and 2 qualitative studies with 4 individual publications. You can download and view my PhD in full here from the Monash Thesis Library.
My passion for reducing food waste was discovered when I was working in a hospital food service in Australia and witnessed first hand how much was going straight into the bin. This is when I decided to look for the answer and met my primary PhD supervisor at a conference I was attending. Jorja also happened to be advertising a PhD in the coming months on this exact topic and I was successful in my application.
Basically what we did was review the available evidence to identify and understand what methods hospitals were doing to measure all their food waste (preparation scraps, serving leftovers, patient plate waste) and disover who was disposing of this food waste in an environmentally friendly way (e.g. composting organics). Then we interviewed hospital staff in Melbourne to find out what they thought of food waste auditing practices as well as interviewed other successful hospital sites around the world (UK, US, EU) who were successfully diverting their food waste from landfill to realise how they implemented these practices.
Moving forward a career ambition of mine is to contribute to the continued reduction of food waste in line with the Sustanable Development Goals in all settings including hospitals, at events and in the home.
