30% of global food production is wasted

In France, a dis­tinc­tion is made between waste, unne­ces­sary waste, and losses. We talk about unne­ces­sary waste for products that are dis­carded (sort­ing, over­pro­duc­tion…), lost (har­vest­ing, pro­cessing, trans­port…) or not con­sumed (expired, served but thrown away). It also includes parts that we do not usu­ally con­sume (mel­on skin, chick­en bones, cherry stems…), wheth­er or not they are recovered. And we gen­er­ally use the term “losses” to talk about products lost upstream, dur­ing pro­duc­tion and pro­cessing, because this word does not have the same neg­at­ive con­nota­tion as “waste”.

Depend­ing on the region and cul­tur­al habits, cer­tain foods (or parts of foods) may or may not be con­sidered edible: leek greens, cit­rus peels, fish heads are not cooked every­where in the world. Moreover, in some coun­tries, food that is reused for anim­al feed or energy pro­duc­tion is not con­sidered as “wasted”. This leads to dif­fer­ences in defin­i­tions, and there­fore actions, from one coun­try to another.

In 2011, the FAO presen­ted the first glob­al estim­ate: about one third of the edible parts of food pro­duced for human con­sump­tion is lost or wasted, which cor­res­ponds to about 1.3 bil­lion tonnes of food per year. The waste is fairly well dis­trib­uted in all coun­tries and between the dif­fer­ent levels of the food chain: 1/3 upstream (pro­duc­tion), 1/3 down­stream (at con­sumer level), 1/3 in between (dis­tri­bu­tion and processing).

For France, Ademe pub­lished the most com­pre­hens­ive study in 2016 by cross-ref­er­en­cing dif­fer­ent data and con­duct­ing over 500 qual­it­at­ive inter­views¹. In 2016, the total amount of food loss and waste was 10 mil­lion tonnes. The waste gen­er­ated in the home is equi­val­ent to 30 kg per per­son per year, includ­ing 7 kg of uneaten food waste that is still pack­aged, and rep­res­ents approx­im­ately €108 per year per per­son (€240 if we con­sider all the losses and waste gen­er­ated through­out the chain). It should be noted that four times more is wasted in col­lect­ive and com­mer­cial cater­ing than in the home (130 g/meal com­pared to 32 g in households).

The Brit­ish star­ted as early as 2005, with the first stud­ies and vari­ous actions put in place, but France was a pion­eer in terms of legis­la­tion. In the frame­work of the Nation­al Pact to Com­bat Waste in 2013, it set a tar­get for redu­cing food losses. Then, in 2016, the Garot law (named after the MP Guil­laume Garot) pri­or­it­ised actions to com­bat waste, banned the destruc­tion of edible food, and obliged shops over 400m² to draw up a dona­tion agree­ment for food that had pre­vi­ously been destroyed.

In 2018, the Egalim 1 law exten­ded the pos­sib­il­ity of dona­tions to col­lect­ive cater­ing and the agri-food industry. Finally, the 2020 Anti-waste for a Cir­cu­lar Eco­nomy (AGEC) law extends the Garot law to the whole­sale trade and adopts tar­gets for a 50% reduc­tion in loss and waste. By 2030 for pro­du­cers, the food industry, and con­sumers, by 2025 for dis­tri­bu­tion and col­lect­ive cater­ing. These are very ambi­tious tar­gets, which aim to set an example at European level. 

At the inter­na­tion­al level, 2015 was a decis­ive year, with the adop­tion of the Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment Goals (SDGs). The object­ive is to halve the volume of food waste per cap­ita by 2030, both in dis­tri­bu­tion and con­sump­tion, and to reduce losses through­out the pro­duc­tion and sup­ply chains.

There are still no reli­able indic­at­ors to mon­it­or the evol­u­tion of waste. Many act­ors, wheth­er upstream (farm­ers and breed­ers) or down­stream (not­ably com­mer­cial cater­ing, trades­men, house­holds), only have a vague idea of what they lose, and often tend to under­es­tim­ate it. As for man­u­fac­tur­ers and dis­trib­ut­ors, they are often faced with a prob­lem of data confidentiality. 

But a European dir­ect­ive makes it com­puls­ory, from 2023 onwards, for each coun­try to pub­lish a glob­al waste fig­ure every four years and a fig­ure per item every year: col­lect­ive and indi­vidu­al cater­ing, house­holds, etc.

Our object­ive at Ademe is to set up tools to help act­ors at each link in the chain to make dia­gnoses and define their reduc­tion actions. We have already developed such tools, for example for canteens, which help man­agers to meas­ure waste and then reduce it², or for food man­u­fac­tur­ers³. The import­ant thing is to get the ball rolling, to show the vari­ous play­ers that it is pos­sible and prof­it­able since it allows them to save on pro­duc­tion costs.

It is very ambi­tious, because it is often quite simple to reduce losses by 30%, but to reach 50% requires real reflec­tion and changes in beha­viour. But people are sup­por­ted, it is feas­ible. In 2019, as part of a “zero waste academy” oper­a­tion, we recruited 243 house­holds who agreed to assess their waste and then fol­low « anti-waste » ges­tures. One year after the start of the sur­vey, they weighed the dis­carded food products again: they had reduced their waste by 59%!

They are decreas­ing. Although sig­ni­fic­ant resources were put in place in 2016 and 2017, it has been dif­fi­cult to mobil­ise them since. It is how­ever essen­tial to have relays in the ter­rit­or­ies such as the REseaux de Lutte contre le Gaspillage Ali­mentaire (REGAL) which help to raise aware­ness among all the act­ors. It would also be neces­sary to run a major nation­al inform­a­tion cam­paign on this issue.

For­tu­nately, in civil soci­ety, com­pan­ies such as Too Good to Go and Phenix have not waited to act and are effect­ively shak­ing up pub­lic author­it­ies and con­sumers alike by invent­ing ori­gin­al solu­tions to com­bat waste.