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Food waste isn’t only what consumers scrape off their plate or leave to rot in their refrigerator. It begins on the farm and can be driven by a whole host of factors beyond the grower’s control. Weather, pests, disease, low market prices or high labor costs all lead to food left in the field. Wasted food is generated from households, food manufacturers, numerous commercial establishments (e.g., restaurants), and various public institutions (e.g., schools, correctional facilities). Food waste from industries and manufacturers occupies a large share in MSW System. manufacturers have a significant amount of semi-finished products, such as ingredients or sauces, and unavoidable waste, such as trimmings and peels. For example, if a company changes the vegetables in a frozen entrée or discontinues a particular variety of yogurt, a manufacturing facility can find itself with tens of thousands of pounds of unneeded vegetables, fruit, or similar ingredients, which may be challenging to donate. Similarly, since vegetable and fruit trimmings and peels cannot be donated, adding them to animal feed or agricultural fields as a source of nutrients may be the best use of that organic material.
American food retailers typically experience in-store losses of 43 billion pounds of food a year. Store managers routinely overorder, for fear of running out of a particular product, losing customers. Entire shelves of perfectly edible vegetables are transferred into Dumpsters to make room for incoming ones. If the affected wholesaler can't quickly find another market nearby, the load will be dumped. Some of the food in these landfills has only recently arrived from nearby restaurants, supermarkets and food processors, still edible when they were tossed into the garbage. Even if something is only slightly blemished, you’ll find that grocery stores will take it off the shelves because they know it won’t move because of customer’s desire for perfect-looking produce. Loath to come up short on supermarket contracts, big commercial growers typically overplant by 10 percent.
After the Food Waste from Manufacturing and Processing, the next largest share belong to Consumers. If we eliminate food wasted from processing and retail, an average American wastes about one pound of food every day, and over the course of 365 days, that adds up to a lot of waste. We overbuy because relatively cheap and seductively packaged food is available at nearly every turn. More than 80 percent of Americans discard perfectly good, consumable food simply because they misunderstand expiration labels.
Labels like “sell by”, “use by”, “expires on”, “best before” or “best by” are confusing to people. In an effort to not risk the potential of a foodborne illness, they’ll just toss it in the garbage. Also, retailers that sell only in large quantities are also feeding our food waste problem. Unfortunately, the costs are so low that sometimes it's cheaper to buy way more than you need than it is to buy a reasonable quantity, so it tends to drive consumer behavior in that direction. We suffer little or no consequence for scraping edible food into a bin.
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