**6. Conclusions**

In this paper, Bangkok was selected as a case study to examine the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the generation of food and plastic waste by consumers by examining shifts in consumer lifestyles and consumption behaviours through a face-to-face questionnaire survey. The potential of food delivery services in the starring role of a COVID-19 success story and the related environmental consequences of food waste, plastic waste, and other problems caused by a new food consumption paradigm were also examined. This paper also provides policy implications and innovative actions for tackling the issues raised to achieve more effective food and plastic waste management.

Although travel bans and diminished economic activity due to COVID-19 have led to a dramatic reduction in MSW, both FW and PW generated by households in Bangkok were observed to have increased during COVID-19. Furthermore, the total amount of FW and PW as well as MSW in Bangkok is expected to rise post-pandemic in the absence of appropriate institutional frameworks and a lack of policy-level directions and effective measurements to address FW and PW issues. This increase may also likely affect our midand long-term goals for transitioning towards sustainability.

Although the data presented in this study are relatively uncertain due to the limited number of samples, this is the first study to contribute to a better understanding of how COVID-19 affects consumer behaviour and can help constitute a basis to further promote behaviour that prevents and reduces FW and PW in households, even outlasting the COVID-19 crisis in Asian developing countries.

Of course, there are many research questions left unanswered. For example, there is still a poor understanding of the impacts made by socio-economic and demographic factors on food managemen<sup>t</sup> behaviour, and on the amount of FW and PW generated by households, as well as throughout the supply chain. Furthermore, to achieve SDG 12, ensuring harmonised data collection on FW and PW remains a challenge in Asia, and practical policies, strategies and actions on household prevention and reduction is an area that can be considered for future study. In addition, the upheaval caused by the COVID-19 crisis has created not only a major challenge, but also an opportunity for reshaping existing policy frameworks and production-consumption style socio-economic systems, as well as a chance to identify the underlying drivers of food waste and their links with plastic packaging. It may also present an opportunity to engage with relevant stakeholders including consumers to tackle the dual challenge of food waste and plastic waste in a systemic way, which is also a topic for further work.

**Supplementary Materials:** The supplementary materials are available online at https://doi.org/10 .6084/m9.figshare.15131100.v1.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, methodology, data analysis, and writing (original draft) by C.L. and P.B.; investigation and data curation by P.B.; funding acquisition and project administration by C.L.; literature review and writing (revision) by C.L. and Q.Z. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was funded by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) under the Strategic Research Fund 2020–2021 and supported by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (S-16) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan, 'Policy Design and Evaluation to Ensure Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns in Asian Region' (2016–2020).

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Supplementary Material associated with this article are openly available in FigShare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.15131100.v1 (accessed on 8 August 2021).

**Acknowledgments:** The authors would like to thank Emma Fushimi and Christine Pearson Ishii for proofreading this paper and would also like to express gratitude to the referees for their useful comments and suggestions.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
