1BILLION meals binned every single day, says UN

OVER $1 TRILLION WORTH OF FOOD WASTED AS 800 MILLION GO HUNGRY

Households around the world threw away one billion meals every single day in 2022 in what the United Nations called a “global tragedy” of food waste.

More than $1 trillion worth of food was binned when nearly 800 million people were going hungry, the UN’s Food Waste Index Report said yesterday. It said more than 1 billion tonnes of food — almost one fifth of all the produce available — was wasted in 2022, most of it by households.

A global tragedy

“Food waste is a global tragedy. Millions will go hungry today as food is wasted across the world,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said. Such wastage was not just a moral but “environmental failure”, the report said.

Food waste produces five times the planet-heating emissions of the aviation sector, and requires huge tracts of land to be converted for growing crops that are never eaten.

The report, co-authored with non-profit organisation Wrap, is just the second on global food waste compiled by the UN and provides the most complete picture to date.

As data collection improves, the true scale of the problem has become clearer, said Clementine O’Connor from UNEP. “The more food waste you look for, the more that you find,” she said.

Staggering numbers

“For me, it’s just staggering,” Richard Swannell from Wrap said. “You could feed all the people that are currently hungry in the world — about 800 million — over a meal a day just from the food that is wasted every year.”

He said bringing together producers and retailers had helped reduce waste and get food to those who need it.

Swannell said much of the waste occurred because people were buying more food than they needed, and also misjudging portion sizes and not eating leftovers.

Another issue was expiration dates, he said, with perfectly good produce being trashed because people incorrectly assumed their food had gone off.