Love Food, Not Waste!
- Oct 4, 2021
- 2 min read
Updated: Oct 5, 2021
September 29 was the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, organised by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
What is Food Loss and Waste?
Food loss and waste refers to all products intended for human consumption being discarded or left to spoil throughout the food system: during harvest, production, storage, processing, transportation, distribution, retail and consumption...
Food loss happens along the supply chain as food travels from farms to wholesale markets.
Food waste occurs at retail and consumer level.
How much is wasted globally?
It has been estimated that one third of the world’s food goes to waste.
A recent study (1) from WWF-UK and Tesco found that around 40%, equivalent to 2.5 billion tonnes of food produced is already being wasted during the farm-stage.
That means within a year, we waste 79 tonnes of food every second; the equivalent weight of one blue whale every two seconds.
What about Hong Kong?
Of the 11,000 tonnes of Municipal Solid Waste disposed of at landfills each day in Hong Kong in 2019, 30% were food waste (2) (more than 3,300 tonnes daily), which is more than paper (24%) and plastics (21%).
More than 100kg of food waste is disposed by each person in just a year!
In 2019, food waste constituted only 3% of the recyclables recovered (3).
What is the impact of food waste?
By wasting food, we also waste all the energy, water, natural resources, labor it takes to grow, harvest, transport, and package it.
Wasted food in landfills is also responsible for 8% of greenhouse emissions worldwide (4).
According to the FAO, if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitting country in the world (5), after China and the USA.
We can see here that the impact of food waste is huge and that fighting food waste is a powerful way to fight climate change.
Let’s reduce food waste together! We can all do our part every single day!
References:
(1)https://wwfint.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/wwf_uk__driven_to_waste___the_global_impact_of_food_loss_and_waste_on_farms.pdf
(2) https://www.wastereduction.gov.hk/sites/default/files/msw2019.pdf
(3) Other recyclables recovered: metals 54%, paper 33%, plastic 5%, electronic equipment 3%, glass 1%...
(5) http://www.fao.org/3/bb144e/bb144e.pdf
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