Every day all over New Zealand, families throw out food that could have been eaten. Bread that has gone stale, bananas that have gone black, and mince that we didn’t cook by the use by date all end up in the rubbish. A good part of the family grocery bill simply gets thrown away.
We don’t have the exact figures for New Zealand but a 2008 United Kingdom study found that on average each person throws away 70kg of edible food a year. That is one third of the all the food a household buys a year – and a huge amount of money! The study also showed that most of the food wasted was avoidable. Sixty-one per cent of the food thrown away could have been eaten if it had been better managed (e.g. left over take-aways, food that has past its expiry date).
The UK study also found the top ten types of avoidable food waste were:
Research undertaken by the Australia Institute found that Australians threw away more than five billion dollars worth of food in 2004. The majority of the food thrown away was fresh food ($2.9 billion) and leftovers ($876 million) with takeaways, drinks and frozen food made up the remainder.
There are lots of reasons not to throw food out that could be eaten.
Imagine that one in every three bags of groceries you buy was dumped straight into the rubbish bin. Reducing the amount of food you waste is one of the biggest single ways of saving money on your weekly household budget.
Over one million tones of waste to landfill are generated by the household sector per year. That is an average of 260 kg per person or 676 kg of waste to landfill per household. Over 44 per cent of that waste is organic with 25 per cent of the total waste being kitchen waste. This is a huge proportion of the waste going to landfill. Compare this with 11 per cent for paper and 10 per cent for plastics.
Energy and water is used to produce, transport, prepare and store food and drink. When food is thrown away this energy and water is wasted.
