Why is food waste so bad for our planet?

Leaving a piece of meat on your plate is not only rude to others. It’s also bad treatment of our planet. Every year about 1.3 billion tons – a third of all our food – are wasted. It costs us approximately $750 billion. And that’s even without the environmental problems.

Food waste causes a lot of pollution: a lot of fertiliser production, large carbon-dioxide emissions by trucks and tractors and people cut the rain forest, causing less carbon-dioxide can be converted into oxygen and water that is unnecessarily used (the amount of water is equal to the volume of the annual flow of the river Wolga). Especially meat makes a big contribution here. Producing a kilogram of grain takes 1,500 liters of water, but to produce 1 kilogram of beef, 15,000 liters of water is needed.

Food waste is largely a problem of the rich customers. Per year more than 44 million tons of food is wasted by only Europeans. This is mainly due to the ‘best before’ and ‘use by’ labels. Less than half of the people know what these mean. – ‘Best before’ says literally what it means: the quality of the product is the best until the  date mentioned. ‘Use by’ is more difficult: this means you can safely consume the product until this date. – Problems in poorer parts of the world are more simple. Bad infrastructure means that in India, 40% of the food is spoiled during transportation to the market.

By Loe

 

By Pi and Lotta

“If the amount of food wasted around the world were reduced by just 25% there would be enough food to feed all the people who are malnourished, according to the UN. ”                                                                                                                                                          ~ The guardian, August 13th, 2015