FOOD WASTE

Every year one third of all food produced for human consumption goes to waste. Especially in the rich countries, a big amount of eatable food is wasted by the consumers. Whereas another huge amount of food is wasted during the whole process of the food production: from agricultural to manufacturing production, from the selling to the food preservation.

In the developing countries, in fact, household food waste is almost nothing, instead most of the food is wasted during the intermediate phases of production or food preservation. As estimated by the United Nations for Food and Agriculture (FAO) a person who lives in Europe or in North America wastes on average 95-115 kg every year, instead in the Sub-Saharan Africa around 6-11 kg per year is wasted, 35% animal and 20% plant.

In terms of environmental impact food waste is a big issue. Food loss and food waste in general represent a huge waste of resources used for the production like energy, water and soil. Producing food which is not going to be consumed leads to useless waste of fossil fuels, largely used to cultivate, transfer, processing food, together with methane product that resulted from anaerobic digestion which occurs when food waste is thrown into landfills. These emissions contribute in a crucial way to climate change. As for carbon dioxide emissions, estimated to be about 3.3 bilions tons of CO2 equivalent according to FAO, it is estimated that if food waste were a state after, the United States and China, it would be in third place among the countries that emit it the most. In addition to emissions, food waste is responsible for increasing deforestation, wich leads to a large and unncessary loss in terms of biodiversity.

In Italy, household food waste has been estimated several times through the use of quizzes while in 2016 the first surveys were carried out using a waste diary and waste product analysis, as part of the REDUCE project, funded by the Ministry of the Environment, Land and the Sea. The final reports of the project are available at the following link (in Italian): https://www.sprecozero.it/2020/07/16/quanto-cibo-si-spreca-in-italia/ .

The still edible household food waste (bone, fishbones and not edible skin) corresponds on average to 530 gr each per week. Multiplied for the number of the members of the Italian population, the household waste amounts in total to 1,67 milion tons in the year 2017.

In the same project, waste in school canteens and supermarkets was quantified and analyzed on a large number of samples. Although the questionnaire is perhaps the quickest and cheapest method to analyze the causes of waste, its predictive capacity with reference to quantities proved to be scarse or controversial. The methodologies used in REDUCE reflect the survey methodologies required by the European Commission to member states .

On 19th August 2016, the law n.166 was approved signed by Hon. Gadda for the limitation of waste, the conscious use of the resources and the environmental sustainability.

According to the figures presented in 2019 by Andrea Segrè (lecturer in Agricultural and comparative policy at the University of Bologna), in the previous twelve in Italy more than 15,502,335,001 euros would have been wasted, equal to about 1% of GDP, of which almost 80% within the home. Thus, denying the decades-long figure of deliberately planned destruction tons of edible food to keep prices high in equilibrium between market supply and demand, in the main interest of wholesalers and large-scale retail trade.