Time To Sort Out Food Waste

By Steve Raskin, Sales director EMEA at TOMRA Sorting Food

Almost a third of all food produced worldwide is never eaten, leading to 1.3 billion tons of food waste each year. This includes around 45 per cent of all fruit and vegetables and 20 per cent of meat. Just one quarter of this wasted food could feed the 795 million chronically hungry people around the world.

Of this waste, over half (54 per cent) is lost in upstream processes, including agricultural production and postharvest handling. The other 46 per cent is wasted in processing, distribution and consumption. With the cost of this totaling US$750 billion per year to the global economy, addressing food wastage offers significant potential to ease pressures on natural resources and the tightening balance of supply and demand.

In September 2015, the United Nations (UN) met to agree to reduce per capita food waste by half by 2030. This set a new precedent by including food loss and food waste reduction within the UN’s global development goals.