The enormous scale of global food waste.
The enormous scale of global food waste.
publication croisée depuis : https://feddit.org/post/3142575
Would be really interesting to look at foodwaste as a percentage of food consumption. Anyone know whether that kind of data is available anywhere?
The UNEP estimates that in 2022, the world produced 1.05 billion tonnes of food waste across the retail, food service and household sectors. The average amount of food waste per capita that year is estimated to be 132 kg, of which 79 kg was household waste.
Fascinating to note, despite all the inefficiencies in capitalist food distribution and how horrifying entire dumpsters full of stale bread or "spoiled" vegetables are, roughly 60% of all food waste occurs at the household level, that is, because of the decisions of individual consumers on how they handle their own food at home.
The next time someone tries to argue "individual consumption doesn't matter" I'll have to cite this chart.
"individual consumption doesn't matter" is green "your vote doesn't matter"
I'd argue individual consumption is often more impactful than your vote. You can't gerrymander a dollar.
When it comes to votes, details aside, your vote is weighed equally to everyone else. When it comes to most matters of consumption, especially relating to greenhouse gasses and other environmental issues, individual "votes" pale in comparison to industry. It becomes more like owning a share in a company, yeah your shareholder vote "matters" but the bank/investment firm that owns 500,000 shares certainly has more sway.
Not that I am disagreeing individual waste is a big part of it, I am not convinced this chart adequately demonstrates that. Is the per capita from the chart after they remove non-individual waste from the total? If not then the per capita includes things like commercial or industrial waste and it’s not really reflecting an individual waste perspective.
Anyone have any ideas why Brazil's per capita is so high?
And Russia's so low?
No idea how its being calculated but if it takes into account food lost during transport, tons of food spoil during transport in Brazil due to the terrible infrastructure for goods.
This is household food waste and the study also inclues retail and food services.
This number is coming from UN's Food Waste Index Report. Page 18 gives some explanation. They measured the amount of trash classified as food and garden in Rio de Janeiro city. This is counting cardboard, cans and plastics. ~42% comes from large generators, e.g. supermarkets, restaurants and schools.
Source: https://brasil.un.org/sites/default/files/2024-03/food_waste_index_report_2024_0.pdf
My own uneducated guess would be weather. But I'm sure it is something else.
That makes sense. Brazil's number is close to its peers in Latin America and the Caribbean.
And how is China so high? Do they just throw shit away all the time?