A Research on UBC Dining Halls' Food Waste
A research project that seeks the root cause of UBC dining halls' food waste to improve sustainability on campus.
What it is
This is a research project initiated in an econometrics course, where we as students, given an uncleaned data source from UBC dining halls, need to propose our own hypothesis for causes of food waste, and build econometric models to test the hypothesis through a variety of econometric methods. Some high-quality projects, determined by the course professor, will be summarized and report back to UBC dining halls to aid them move towards UBC’s sustainability goals.
Highlights
- Applied multivariate OLS regression to 270+ observations across three dining halls to quantify the impact of meal-period foot traffic on daily food waste.
- Diagnosed heteroskedasticity using White’s test and re-estimated models with heteroskedasticity-consistent (HC) robust standard errors; performed hypothesis testing, including F-tests, by meal period.
- Identified statistically significant effects at Orchard Commons Dining Hall (breakfast β = −0.25, lunch β = +0.37, both p < 0.01) and validated results through robustness checks using simplified model specifications.