Weslynne Ashton on Investing in Food Waste Reduction Strategies
Lab’s co-lead Professor Weslynne Ashton spoke to Market Scale on key strategies for reducing food waste at scale, and the role of collaborations and partnerships to mobilize collective efforts:
“Businesses want to do the right thing but are often unsure of what to do because the rules aren’t in place. They can collaborate with their peers and work with local state officials to help shape that food waste policy. This ensures that we’re preventing food waste, rescuing what is edible, and capturing what is inedible so that the residual value can be captured, not the wasted food”.
Our paper in EPIC 2023: on welcoming diverse stakeholder visions
We presented our new paper, 'The Un-common Good: Making Room for Radical Transition Imaginaries' at the EPIC 2023 Conference. We discuss: 'How might our diverse visions for the 'common good' pave the way to radical transition pathways?'. We offer a practical approach for surfacing diverse visions of stakeholder groups and creatively using the tensions amongst these in for collaborations. We share our learnings from the new tools and methods that we developed in the Design for Climate Leadership course in Spring 2023, and discuss how a narrative-based approach helps broaden our framing of wasted food as a systemic issue, and challenge our assumptions about what desirable alternatives might look like.
Closing the Loop: Food waste prevention pathways for Chicago
During Spring 2023, the Design for Climate Leadership course focused on a 14-week exploration where ten ID students worked with key stakeholders around food waste prevention in Chicago to envision equitable and sustainable pathways for keeping food and scraps from landfills.
Learn more about how we leveraged the power of visualization and narratives to support dialogue across a diverse group of stakeholders and tap on their collective wisdom.
Weslynne Ashton Discusses Food Waste
Associate Professor Weslynne Ashton was featured on FOX32 Chicago (starts at 2:35 in video here.)
Weslynne has a joint appointment at the Institute of Design and the Stuart School of Business. She’s a sustainable systems scientist who focuses on the circular economy and increasing sustainability and equity in urban food systems.
Weslynne’s work in finding ways to reduce wasted food nationally is supported by $15 million in funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Equitable Food Procurement
Over the course of a 14-week collaboration between a variety of community partners involved in the Chicago food ecosystem led by Prof. Carlos Teixeira, students were challenged to develop infrastructures to support the goals of the GFPP, which was adopted by the City of Chicago in October 2017. But they soon realized to succeed they would need to define an equitable and sustainable system for the movement of nutrients throughout Chicago.