Human Nutrition student Briar Mills in action at the University’s Three Minute Thesis competition this year.
Sorting through food waste bins for about a month at Otago’s 14 colleges – wearing a protective hazmat suit – for nation-leading research has won Human Nutrition student Briar Mills the University’s Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) Master competition this year.
“It wasn’t as disgusting as you might initially think because I was doing it on the day the food waste was generated, which was a lot better than if it was a few days old and starting to get smelly,” she says.
“There were a few icky moments but it was pretty good. I’d put on a podcast or the radio and just sort away.”
Briar’s research is the first in Aotearoa New Zealand to examine college food waste in such depth, says her co-supervisor and Director of the Food Waste Innovation Research Theme, Professor Miranda Mirosa.
This makes Briar’s work “invaluable in helping us understand our country's overall food waste profile and impact”, Miranda says.
Collecting detailed and accurate data on food waste is essential for creating effective plans to reduce waste and promote sustainable resource use.
Briar’s co-supervisor and Human Nutrition Professor Sheila Skeaff says Briar was “amazing”.
“She is a food waste champion in every way; she showed that collecting and sorting through food waste was fun science and helps the planet.”
Briar Mills sorts waste at one of Dunedin's colleges.
Briar discovered that about 160 tonnes of food is wasted across the colleges in a year – an average of 170 grams per student per day – and half of it comes from students’ plates.
Her research created baseline measurements for how much food is wasted and what types, so Otago can introduce the best practice approach to reducing it - Target, Measure, Act.
Otago is driving down food waste as part of its goal to reduce the total waste produced, and to shift to 50 per cent of all waste being diverted from landfill, so needs a baseline measure of existing food waste.
Briar says “what gets measured, gets managed”.
She spent three days at each residential college, auditing waste from food preparation, the servery, and plates, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
She also held focus groups with staff and students at three colleges to discuss their thoughts about food waste. Their strong consensus is it should not go to landfill, but to compost or be fed to pigs.
“However, it’s better to produce less waste in the first place, than think of more sustainable ways to dispose of it,” Briar says.
The focus group’s other ideas ranged from posters to remind students not to take more than they can eat, to intercollege competitions tracking the waste.
Because food waste is a global problem, everyone has a part to play and Briar hopes people see efforts to reduce food waste in colleges as applicable to their lives at study, work, and home too.
The Three Minute Thesis competition involves thesis Master and Doctoral students presenting their research in no more than three minutes, with only one static slide, to an audience – with the aim of making the subject easily understood by non-specialists.
Briar won $500 in the Master section of the competition and submitted her thesis in July for marking.
She was initially going to complete the food waste audit as part of a University of Otago Sustainability Office scholarship but when the Covid pandemic struck, colleges were not accessible so the project pivoted to interviewing people in New Zealand’s tertiary sector about how they deal with food waste. This work was published in the journal Pūhau ana te rā.
Briar then decided to do the audit as part of her Master of Human Nutrition and incorporated her interviews into that as well.
She is now doing her writing bursary with the aim of having a paper or papers published about her thesis research.