We are pleased to welcome researchers Fredrik Wikström and Helén Williams to CTF. They focus their research on how packaging can affect people to throw away less food.
Fredrik Wikström and Helén Williams are active in the field of Environmental and Energy Systems at Karlstad University. At the moment they are conducting research within an ongoing FORMAS project that runs up to 2019.
– To be able to change our research environment, to participate in a larger and excellent environment, and being able to learn more about service perspectives, behavior and its influence on the environmental impact and the earth’s resources feels fantastic. Our research is interdisciplinary and combines natural science environmental calculations with how different technical solutions meet people’s needs and affect their behavior. Since we don’t have the research competence on behavior, the move to CTF will be a boost for our research, says Helén Williams.
– I also think that Helén and I will be able to contribute to other research areas within CTF with our competence in sustainable development and hope to provide insights and inspire projects that benefit people, businesses and the environment, says Fredrik Wikström.
Fredrik Wikström is a lecturer in Environmental and Energy Systems. He has moved between several academic disciplines. He started as a physicist at Uppsala University, continued with biology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences where he defended his dissertation in system ecology. In Karlstad his research has become more focused on how of various technical solutions can reduce environmental problems. Over time there has been an increase in focus on the interaction between man and technology.
Helén Williams is a lecturer in Environmental and Energy Systems. She defended her thesis “Food packaging for sustainable development” in 2011, which deals with how the environmental impact changes when the packaging services are added as packaging attributes in the environmental analysis. The broader environmental analysis that includes possible consumer behaviors shows, among other things, that it is much more important that the packaging contributes to less food is wasted than reducing the amount of packaging material. In 2012 Helén was awarded half a million SEK from Sundbladfondens Research Foundation’s and spent six months at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
