Food Waste Crisis!!! (FWC)

Breaking news in Australian kitchens! Up to a quarter of the food being bought in a year is put in the bin. I repeat, a quarter of YOUR food is going in the bin! That's 4 MILLION TONNES of half eaten, past-its-used-by and perfectly good food wasted every year in Australia !!!!!!!!

Our team decided to collect and weigh all the food scraps that had been thrown out in our school in one day

 

 

 

How does this terrible occurrence happen? Ask yourself, do you eat EVERYTHING you buy? Do you still use products once they have passed their "Best Before" date? Do you have a worm farm or compost heap? If you answered no to any of the above questions then you could be part of this tragedy!

 Every time a piece of food is thrown out, every time that out of date product is discarded they worm their way into the great tragedy that is the Food Waste Crisis (FWC).
This FWC is rearing its ugly head all across the country! Households are losing $600 dollars per year to the beast of the feast. Hide your kids! Hide your wives! Or the next thing you know your family members will be shipped off to the tip!

Book now because space is filling up fast! Our landfill facilities are currently housing unnecessary  tonnes of food waste! This staggering stastic is only belittled by the amount of greenhouse gases, particularly methane, the food produces when it breaks down!

 

Statistics:

·         Australians discard up to 20% of the food they purchase

·         This equates to 1 out of every 5 bags of groceries they buy

·         Up to 40% of the average household garbage bin is food

·         For the average Australian household $1,036 of food is thrown away each year

What could this be spent on:
 

·         Enough to feed the average household for over a month

·         Paying off six months of your electricity bill

·         Aussies throw out $8 billion of edible food every year

·         Australia wastes 4 million tonnes of food each year

·         This equates to 523kg per household, which is the same weight as just over 5 average size            fridges!

 

Out of the $8 billion what do we waste every year?

 

·         $2.67 billion of fresh food = 33%

·         $2.18 billion of leftovers = 27%

·         $1.17 billion of packaged and long-life products = 15%

·         $727 million of drinks = 9%

·         $727 million of frozen food = 9%

·         $566 million of takeaways = 7%

 

Why is it wasted?

 

·         We cook too much food

·         Food is mistakenly thrown out before the use-by/best before date

·         We forget about leftovers in the fridge/freezer

·         We don't know how to use leftovers

·         We buy too much because we don't stick to a shopping list

·         We often shop when we're hungry so we buy more food than we need

·         We don't check the cupboard or fridge before going shopping

·         We are not planning our meals and menus as much as we could

·         Buying takeaways at the last minute instead of cooking the food we have in/family members           changing plans

 

Who are the biggest wasters of food?

 

·         Young consumers (18-24)

·         Households with incomes of more than $100,000 per year

·         Families with children

 

 

When food rots in landfill, it gives off a greenhouse gas called Methane which is 25 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere, than the carbon pollution that comes out of your car exhaust.

The hidden impact?

When you throw out food, you also waste the water, fuel and resources it took to get the food from the paddock to your plate.

An estimated 20-40% of fruit and vegetables are rejected even before they reach the shops mostly because they do not match consumers' and supermarkets' high cosmetic standards.

If you add up the food Australia wastes each year, it's enough to fill 450,000 garbage trucks. Placed end to end, the convoy would bridge the gap between Australia and New Zealand just over three times.

 

According to CSIRO data, dumping a kg of beef can waste the 15,000 litres it took to produce that meat. Throwing out a kilo of white rice will waste 2,385 litres. The water and energy used to produce our crops and livestock is out of sight and out of mind when we throw it in the bin. 

Around the world each year, approximately one third of our food supply goes to waste.

This 1.3 billon tonnes of food, valued at nearly US$1 trillion dollars, is lost in the food supply chain while 900 million people go hungry.

To address these staggering figures and encourage both governments and organisations to join the battle against food waste, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation has established the “Save Food” initiative - a global effort designed to cut down on food losses and waste.

In June 2012, Save Food released Food Wastage Footprints to communicate the scale of this global problem.

Resources used to collect information and statistics used in this blog

(www.foodwise.com.au)
(www.afgc.org.au) (www.ipart.nsw.gov.au) (http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.nsw.gov.au/love-food/research.aspx) (http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.nsw.gov.au/love-food/environmental-impacts.aspx)

lunchalot.com

 greenblizzard.com

http://www.foodbanknsw.org.au/about-us/who-we-are/
-http://reduceyourfootprint.com.au/tags/reducing-waste/

http://www.save-food.org/
http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&docid=QGCeE0XVn_8FWM&tbnid=3kzMhC6lJi0bQM:&ved=0CAQQjB0&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tumbleweed.com.au%2FWhyRecycle.aspx&ei=4ZL3UfuNEYXSkwWIo4GoBA&bvm=bv.49967636,d.dGI&psig=AFQjCNEP6Ofvwi1kEFCy1RSdTyXOKobjZw&ust=1375265611810739

 What are some solutions to this huge problem?

• plan meals and use a shopping list
• only buy the food that you're sure you will consume
• check what food is at home or if the food is out of date before you buy more
• use left-overs as the basis for other meals
• place any vegetable scraps, egg shells, coffee grounds, tea bags in a compost system or worm farm or feed to the chooks
• grow your own fruit and vegetables so that you can pick as you need 
• give away any excess food you have to a charity organisation such as Foodbank or Second Bite
•  share your excess food with friends, families and neighbours
• freeze and preserve excess food or left over meals  

Foodbank NSW is a non-denominational, community supported not-for-profit, that collects unwanted food and re-distributes it to people in need through welfare agencies.
Foodbank NSW is the largest food relief agency in NSW, providing 95% of all wholesale emergency food relief in the state.

 Did you know that in NSW:

• More than 680,000 people have run out of food or gone hungry in the last 12 months
• Half of these hungry are children
• The need is growing, particularly amongst the working poor and elderly

Foodbank NSW delivers 5.3 million meals a year to people in need in NSW (and more than 31 million meals nationally) but there is an ever-increasing demand that needs to be met.

Foodbank NSW supplies more than 470 charities, community groups and schools with the food it takes to feed the disadvantaged.

Foodbank NSW saves 4 million kgs of food from being dumped very year. This food not only goes to feeding the needy, but also reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 6 million kgs a year.

Foodbank is by far the largest hunger relief organisation in Australia

SecondBite is an Australian organisation committed to making a positive difference to people by identifying sources of nutritious surplus fresh food and produce that would otherwise go to waste and facilitating its safe and timely distribution to agencies and people in need.

In 2012, SecondBite rescued three million kg of fresh food that might have otherwise gone to waste.