The inhabitants of the European Union, led by the United Kingdom, waste 22 million tonnes of food each year, according to a study commissioned by the European Commission.
When it comes to food waste, the United Kingdom has a sad prize. This is the conclusion of a study carried out on the basis of data available in six states of the old continent by the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Commission, and published in the journal Environmental Research.
The authors reviewed data from six national studies on food waste – UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Romania. While accepting the difficulty there is in calculating this waste, due to the absence of reliable data, they attempted to quantify this great waste of food and resources used to produce them (water and nitrogen).
A tin a day
To do this, the researchers measured the nitrogen and water footprint of populations, two indicators of food production, provided by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization).
By crossing this data, they were able to establish that every inhabitant of the United Kingdom wasted the equivalent of a tin a day. The Romanians, who are the least wasteful of the states observed, waste an apple per day and per person.
Unsurprisingly, the most spoiled foods are fruits, vegetables and grains, then meat. According to the authors, 80% of wasted food is “avoidable” waste.
By extrapolating these data to other states in the European Union, the researchers succeeded in establishing that Europeans wasted 22 million tonnes of food each year. This corresponds to a loss of water (to produce these foods) of 57 km3 per year.
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