The food we waste

This ground-breaking report was launched on 8 May 2008.

It provides, for the first time, an objective assessment of the amounts and types of food we buy but don’t eat.

It is a call to action for government, retailers, food manufacturers, NGOs and all of us, in our role as consumers, to reduce the food we waste.

In the UK we throw away 6.7 million tonnes of food every year, roughly a third of everything we buy. Most of this avoidable and could have been eaten if only we had planned, stored and managed it better. Less than a fifth is truly unavoidable – things like bones, cores and peelings.

Nearly one quarter of the 4.1 million tonnes of avoidable food waste is thrown away whole, untouched or unopened. Of this, at least 340,000 tonnes is still in date when thrown away. A further 1.2 million tonnes is simply left on our plates. This all adds up to a story of staggering wastefulness. For example every day we throw away:

• 5.1 million whole potatoes
• 4.4 million whole apples
• 2.8 million whole tomatoes
• 7 million whole slices of bread
• 1.3 million unopened yoghurts and yoghurt drinks
• 1.2 million sausages
• 1 million slices of ham
• 0.7 million whole eggs
• 0.7 million whole bars of chocolate and unwrapped sweets
• 0.3 million unopened meat-based ready meals or takeaways
• 0.3 million unopened packets of crisps

All this wasted food is costly; in the UK we spend £10.2 billion every year buying and then throwing away good food. That works out at £420 for the average UK household. And for households with children it’s even more - £610 a year.

Local councils then spend another £1 billion collecting our food waste and sending most of it to landfill.

Food waste is also harmful to the environment. The food we throw away needlessly is responsible for the equivalent of 18 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year – that’s the same as the CO2 emitted by one in every five cars on UK roads. It’s not just the methane that’s released when the food goes to landfill that’s the problem, but also the energy spent producing, storing and transporting the food to us. Put another way, every tonne of food we throw away needlessly is responsible for 4.5 tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions.

Food waste is an enormous challenge, not least because most of us don’t yet recognise the amount we all produce. But it is also a massive opportunity – to reduce waste, save money and minimise our impact on the environment.

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