It’s a fact – most of us waste far too much!
In the UK the average family throws away 22% of their weekly shop, which is worth £800 per year. In the U.S., the per-family equivalent is worth a staggering $2,275 each year!
(Info’ from olioex.com).
Food waste statistics
1. Over 1/3 of all food produced globally goes to waste.
2. The annual value of food wasted globally is $1 trillion, and it weighs 1.3 billion tonnes.
3. All the world’s nearly one billion hungry people could be fed on less than a quarter of the food that is wasted in the U.S., UK and Europe.
4. An area larger than China is used to grow food that is never eaten.
5. 25% of the world’s fresh water supply is used to grow food that is never eaten.
6. If food waste were a country it would be the 3rd largest emitter of greenhouse gases (after China & the USA).
7. In most developed countries, over half of all food waste takes place in the home.
8. Meanwhile, food waste at the retail store level is less than 2% of total food waste (though supermarket practices are directly responsible for much food waste elsewhere in the supply chain).
9. In the home food waste is worth £800 per year to the average UK family ($2,275 in the USA), which collectively adds up to £15 billion per year.
10. 2.3 billion people are joining the planet by 2050 – this will require a 60-70% increase in global food production. Or we can just stop throwing away our food!
Globally at least 33% of wood is never eaten
Between 33-50% of all food produced globally is never eaten, and the value of this wasted food is worth over $1 trillion. To put that in perspective, in the USA food waste represents 1.3% of the total GDP. Food waste is a massive market inefficiency, the kind of which does not persist in other industries.
Hungry – shocking stats
800 million people go to bed hungry every night. That is 1 in 9 people on the planet who are starving or malnourished. Each and every one of them could be sufficiently fed on less than a quarter of the food that is wasted in the USA, UK and Europe each year.
Go check it out at olioex.com
Information accessed via the OLIO website. For a full report and analysis please visit OLIO. It makes for an extremely interesting but morally worrying read.
Note: Information available at www.olioex.com – (not independently verified).