According to a new UN report, “Households across all continents wasted over 1 billion meals a day in 2022, while 783 million people were affected by hunger and a third of humanity faced food insecurity.” Food waste also contributes to the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste (UNEP Press Release, 2024).
Food waste is expensive too. The 2024 UN Food Waste Index report — which measured food waste at the consumer and retail level across more than 100 countries — found that over a trillion dollars’ worth of food gets disposed every year, from households to grocery stores, across the globe (UNEP, 2024; Delgado, 2024).
“Such waste takes a significant toll on the environment. The process of producing food — the raising of animals, the land and water use, and the subsequent pollution that goes with it — is horribly intensive on the planet. Food waste squanders those efforts, and then makes it worse: as it rots in landfills, it creates methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Food waste alone is responsible for an estimated 8 to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report. To put that into perspective, if food waste were a country, it would be third in emissions produced, behind only the United States and China.” (Delgado, 2024; UNEP, 2024)
“Perhaps the most immediate harm, though, is the more than 780 million people who went hungry around the world in 2022, even as hundreds of billions of meals were wasted that same year. The world has become more efficient at producing a lot of food, so much so that there’s more than enough to go around for everyone. But in 2022, nearly 30 percent of people were moderately or severely food insecure, defined by the Food and Agricultural Organization as lacking regular access to safe and nutritious food.”
“Food waste reduction is “an opportunity to reduce costs and to tackle some of the biggest environmental and social issues of our time: fighting climate change and addressing food insecurity,” the authors of the report write.” (Delgado, 2024)
“Food waste might seem like an easy problem to solve — just stop wasting food. But in order to snuff food waste out, individuals, businesses, and policymakers alike will need to make some serious changes — and those changes will look different for each country. Global food waste is not just a consumer-level problem, but also a nasty side effect of inefficient food systems that have environmental and social implications.” (Delgado, 2024)
“The UN has the goal of slashing food waste in half by 2030. For that to happen, the authors of the Food Waste Index say there’s one crucial step all countries need to do: data collection. You can’t stop wasting food until you know how much food you’re wasting.” (Delgado, 2024; UNEP, 2024)
The report uses a three-level methodology with each level increasing in accuracy and utility. The first level is an estimate using preexisting food waste data from countries. For countries that haven’t yet started collecting data on food waste, UNEP took data from other nearby countries that had similar income levels and then extrapolated that information to create estimates. These figures are a helpful start to understanding the scale at which food waste may exist in a country, but the report emphasizes that most of the Level 1 estimates are not accurate enough to use beyond that.
To clarify which estimates can be used for understanding the scale of a problem and which can be used beyond that, the report also assigned a “confidence” rating to each Level 1 estimate — high, medium, low, very low, or no rating. Only 11 countries were assigned a high confidence rating for household food waste estimates. Of these, Saudi Arabia had the highest amount of household food waste per person annually, at a little over 231 pounds per person. Bhutan had the lowest, at just under 42 pounds per person.” (Delgado, 2024; UNEP, 2024)
How do you measure food waste?
“According to the report — which was spearheaded by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and co-authored by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a UK-based climate organization — households contributed to 60 percent of all food waste generated globally in 2022, compared to nearly 28 percent for food service and a little under 13 percent for retailers.” (Delgado, 2024; UNEP, 2024)
“The report uses a three-level methodology with each level increasing in accuracy and utility. The first level is an estimate using preexisting food waste data from countries. For countries that haven’t yet started collecting data on food waste, UNEP took data from other nearby countries that had similar income levels and then extrapolated that information to create estimates. These figures are a helpful start to understanding the scale at which food waste may exist in a country, but the report emphasizes that most of the Level 1 estimates are not accurate enough to use beyond that.” (Delgado, 2024; UNEP 2024)
“Only four G20 countries (Australia, Japan, UK, the USA) and the European Union have food waste estimates suitable for tracking progress to 2030. Canada and Saudi Arabia have suitable household estimates, with Brazil’s estimate expected late 2024. In this context, the report serves as a practical guide for countries to consistently measure and report food waste.” (UNEP Press Release, 2024)
“The data confirms that food waste is not just a ‘rich country’ problem, with levels of household food waste differing in observed average levels for high-income, upper-middle, and lower-middle-income countries by just 7 kg per capita. At the same time, hotter countries appear to generate more food waste per capita in households, potentially due to higher consumption of fresh foods with substantial inedible parts and a lack of robust cold chains.” (UNEP Press Release, 2024)
Out of six different regions of the world, Latin America and the Caribbean is the region that wastes the most food annually (Delgado, 2024; UNEP, 2024). In low-income countries, people may waste food due to lack of refrigeration. In contrast, in high-income countries, people who waste food may be less concerned about waste and resource use (Delgado, 2024; UNEP, 2024).
Learn useful tips for reducing food waste in your household here:
How to cut down on food waste at home
https://one5c.com/food-waste-disposal-136944418/
And finally, click on the link below to learn how to use a wide variety of fruit and vegetable peels (apples, carrots, citrus fruits, eggplant, kiwis, mangos, potatoes, and tomatoes) to reduce food waste and increase the nutritional content of your meals:
Using Fruit and Vegetable Peels in Your Meals: How To
References
United Nations Environment Report (UNEP). World squanders over 1 billion meals a day: UN report. Press Release. March 27, 2024. Available at: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/world-squanders-over-1-billion-meals-day-un-report
United Nations Environment Report (UNEP). Food Waste Index Report 2024. Think Eat Save: Tracking Progress to Halve Global Food Waste. Nairobi, Kenya: UNEP. March 27, 2024. Available at: https://wedocs.unep.org/handle/20.500.11822/45230
Colino S. Don’t trash the peels! The skins of fruits and veggies pack a nutritional punch. National Geographic. March 26, 2024. Available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/are-you-discarding-the-most-nutritious-part-of-fruits-and-veggies?rid=C9BE3CDDB176B86AF366007379D84B33&cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=Daily_NL_Tuesday_Science_20240326
European Commission. Food Waste Index Report 2024. Think Eat Save: Tracking Progress to Halve Global Food Waste. March 27, 2024. Available at: https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/publication/food-waste-index-report-2024-think-eat-save-tracking-progress-halve-global-food-waste_en
Delgado S. How the world wastes hundreds of billions of meals in a year, in three charts. May 4, 2024. Vox. Available at: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/4/24147350/billions-of-meals-wasted-unep-study-food
Watson SK. How to cut down on food waste at home. One 5C. Mach 14, 2024. Available at: https://one5c.com/food-waste-disposal-136944418/
Song J, Jeong J, Eun-Hee Kim E-H, et al. A strategy for healthy eating habits of daily fruits revisited: A metabolomics study. Current Research in Food Science. 2023;6: 100440.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crfs.2023.100440
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