Watch My Waste
Source: WRAP Guardians of Grub campaign
“We reduced our weekly coffee bill by nearly 30 per cent and probably even 50 per cent,
overall.”
Today, 29 September 2022, is the UNEP International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste (IDAFLW).
It is important to remember that food waste has significant environmental, economic and social impacts. In Australia, according to the FIAL 2021 Feasibility Study, we waste over 7.6 million tonnes (36.6 billion dollars) of food across the entire supply chain each year, creating nearly 17.6MT CO2e of greenhouse gas emissions.
This amount of food waste could fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground to the brim 9 times. It equates to all Australians throwing away 310 kg every year, or nearly a kilogram of food wasted every day. Yet the 2021 Foodbank Hunger Report tells us that 1 in 6 Australian adults are severely food insecure.
This mismatch demonstrates that we do not have a shortage of food – we have a broken system that doesn’t always ensure still-consumable surpluses get to people who critically need them. The amazing teams at Foodbank, OzHarvest, SecondBite and FareShare work collaboratively, including through Stop Food Waste Australia’s Food Rescue Sector Action Plan, to:
· Increase the volume of edible, nutritious food recovered
· Decrease the volume of food waste along the food value chain, and
· Improve the collection and distribution of rescued food to assist food insecure people in Australia.
The four largest food rescue organisations in Australia: Foodbank, OzHarvest, SecondBite and FareShare.
Thank you!
If you personally want to thank any or all of these indispensable organisations today on IDAFLW, I encourage you to make a donation through their websites above.
Source: WRAP Guardians of Grub
The other mismatch is in our businesses. The quote at the top of this post was from a participant in my PhD research project, ‘Watch My Waste’, in which foodservice businesses audited their food waste over a 3-month period. Less than a quarter of businesses had ever done an audit before, and unsurprisingly, they were astonished by how much food they were wasting as they had thought that they ran lean organisations.
If you don’t look, you don’t see.
And once seen, it is impossible to un-see.
“My motivation was to actually see, to gauge where we’re at and if there’s any way to save money in the business, I want to work out where it is and how we can do that.
Also, then it very much supports my own food philosophy and my ethos of how we should be dealing with food.”
Simply by watching their waste, businesses quickly identified where they were losing food (and consequently profits and opportunities), and could target simple effective initiatives to cut waste.
As Kathy* shared, reducing waste can have a dramatic impact on the bottom line!
(*not the participant’s real name)