Abstract
Contributing to environmental pollution and resources depletion, food waste represents a considerable inefficiency of the global food system. Within the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, countries committed to halve per-capita food waste generated at retail and consumer levels and to decrease food waste along the food supply chain by 2030. Reliable and detailed information on food waste is of utmost importance for the actors of the food supply chain, organizations and governments willing to implement and monitor effective reduction strategies. The present paper is a review of existing studies on food waste generation at the global and European scales and aims primarily at describing and comparing the approaches adopted, and secondarily at analysing their potential in supporting food waste related European interventions and policies. Ten studies were selected among relevant scientific papers and grey literature and their underlying quantification methodologies were systematically analysed. Methodological elements discussed in the paper include type of waste streams captured by estimations, distinction between edible and inedible food waste along the agro-food supply chain, reported units of measure, overall inefficiencies of the food system, and uncertainty of data. Current estimations of food loss and waste generation range between 194–389 kg per person per year at the global scale, and between 158–298 kg per person per year at the European scale. However, further efforts are needed to improve their level of detail and reliability and to foster their support to food loss and waste-related strategies.
Highlights
About one third of the food produced for human consumption is currently wasted at the global scale (FAO, 2011)
The primary aim of the present paper is to describe and compare the approaches adopted by different methods to account for Food waste (FW) generation as well as their implications on the results
A refinement of the selection of papers was accomplished, considering titles and, if necessary abstracts, according to the following criteria: (i) the study reported an estimation of FW generated either at European or global scales, based on statistics or proxies; (ii) the study included an overall estimation of FW and it did not focus on a single product; (iii) the estimation interested at least one of the life cycle stages from food manufacturing and consumption; (iv) the amount of FW was expressed in terms of mass
Summary
About one third of the food produced for human consumption is currently wasted at the global scale (FAO, 2011). Food waste (FW) generation, happening throughout the entire food supply chain around the globe, is dominated by different dynamics, associated by the same unsustainable paradigm. Wasting food contributes to environmental pollution as well as to natural resources degradation and depletion, threatening food security (Foley et al, 2011). FW is one of the targets of both environmental and food security policies at different scales. According to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12.3, per-capita FW at retail and consumer levels should be halved and FW along the entire food supply chain should be reduced by 2030 (UN, 2015). The European Commission, beyond having committed to the SDG 12.3 reduction target on FW, has included FW among the priority areas of the Circular Economy Action Plan, and is committed to define a common EU methodology for FW accounting and to propose relevant indicators (EC, 2015)
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