ABSTRACT
About one third of the food produced globally is wasted along the food chain, representing a burden for the environment and an inefficiency of the food system. Tackling food waste is a priority on the global political agenda to guarantee food security. Defining a methodology for food waste quantification is key to monitoring progress towards the achievement of reduction targets. This paper summarises the outcomes of a workshop on food waste accounting co-organised by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre and Directorate-General on Health and Food Safety with the aim of stimulating harmonisation of methodologies, identifying challenges, opportunities, and further advancement for food waste accounting. The paper presents methodological aspects, e.g. system boundaries, reliability of data, accounting of water flows, to ensure better support to food waste policy design and interventions. It addresses all the actors of the food supply chain, governments, and research institutions.
ABSTRACT
Food losses and food waste (FLW) have become a global concern in recent years and emerge as a priority in the global and national political agenda (e.g., with Target 12.3 in the new United Nations Sustainable Development Goals). A good understanding of the availability and quality of global FLW data is a prerequisite for tracking progress on reduction targets, analyzing environmental impacts, and exploring mitigation strategies for FLW. There has been a growing body of literature on FLW quantification in the past years; however, significant challenges remain, such as data inconsistency and a narrow temporal, geographical, and food supply chain coverage. In this paper, we examined 202 publications which reported FLW data for 84 countries and 52 individual years from 1933 to 2014. We found that most existing publications are conducted for a few industrialized countries (e.g., the United Kingdom and the United States), and over half of them are based only on secondary data, which signals high uncertainties in the existing global FLW database. Despite these uncertainties, existing data indicate that per-capita food waste in the household increases with an increase of per-capita GDP. We believe that more consistent, in-depth, and primary-data-based studies, especially for emerging economies, are badly needed to better inform relevant policy on FLW reduction and environmental impacts mitigation.
Subject(s)
Conservation of Natural Resources , Data Accuracy , Food Supply , Food , Geography , Humans , United KingdomABSTRACT
Knowledge about the total waste generated by the production of consumer goods can help raise awareness among policy-makers, producers and consumers of the benefits of closing loops in a future circular economy, avoiding unnecessary production and production steps and associated generation of large amounts of waste. In strict life cycle assessment practice, information on waste outputs from intermediate industrial processes of material and energy transformation is translated into and declared as potential environmental impacts, which are often not reported in the final results. In this study, a procedure to extract available intermediate data and perform a systematic pre-consumer waste footprint analysis was developed. The pre-consumer waste footprint concept was tested to analyse 10 generic products, which provided some novel and interesting results for the different product categories and identified a number of challenges that need to be resolved in development of the waste footprint concept. These challenges include standardised data declaration on waste in life cycle assessment, with a separation into waste categories illustrating the implicit environmental and scale of significance of waste types and quantities (e.g. hazardous waste, inert waste, waste for recycling/incineration) and establishment of a common definition of waste throughout sectors and nations.
