Earth Day 2022: 10 interesting facts on food waste

The World’s Earth Day has been celebrated annually on April, 22 since 1970. The day is an occasion to promote support for environmental protection. In 2022, the official slogan is #InvestInOurPlanet and it prompts solutions to fight climate change and involves such parties as governments, businesses, and regular citizens to take action.

Fight food waste, save Earth

As a company delivering a revolutionary solution for shelf-life extension, better appearance, and quality of fresh produce, the single most prominent element of our mission is to fight food waste. This is one of the relatively few fast and easy ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. How? As you can find in ReFED 2021 Annual Impact Report, the food that goes unsold or uneaten is the primary product entering landfills, where it generates the highest amounts of methane, which is 80 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane, on the other hand, is a gas that lives quite shortly. It is removed from the atmosphere via a chemical reaction that lasts for about 12 years – compared to CO2 which affects the climate for thousands of years.  So reducing food waste can impact the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in just a decade or two.

10 interesting facts on food waste

On Earth Day 2022, we have prepared for you the list of 10 compelling facts about food waste:

1. 26% of global carbon emissions are created by growing and producing food alone. (1) 
2. If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, right after China and the United States. (2)
3. The United Nations has set a goal to half food waste. This would reduce the global greenhouse gas emissions by a massive 1.5 gigatons per year, which is more than the current emissions of Japan itself. (3) 
4. Food waste means a massive squandering of resources, including water, land, energy, labor, and capital used to produce the food that is wasted. (4) If we halved the food waste, it would mean there would no longer be a need to convert an area the size of Argentina into agricultural land (which, if we continue to consume at the rate that we do, we’d need to). (5)
5. The sad truth is that one-third of the food grown is never eaten. (6) It is wasted.
6. The amount of food wasted in the U.S. translates into 90 billion meals’ that could be served. (7)
7. All starving people in the world (over 811 million people) could be fed by less than a quarter of the food lost or wasted in the US and Europe alone. (8)
8. Every day the equivalent of 20 million slices of bread are thrown away in UK homes. This could have fed breakfast to 10 million people. (9)
9. Food waste costs the United States roughly 2% of its GDP, the same happens in Canada. (10)
10. Halving food waste can be a more effective way to protect biodiversity than changing people’s diets. But the real power comes from a combination of reducing food waste with the adoption of a sustainable diet. This could decrease the U.S. biodiversity footprint of food consumption by roughly half. (11)

Our impact

Our mission is to be at the forefront of a better tomorrow when it comes to fighting food waste. Therefore we provide solutions for the food waste issue in the area of fresh produce. Our Vidre+ technology helps limit the wastage at 4 top links of food value chain representing over 36% of the 56% produce waste issue in Europe. That translates into a potential yearly savings of over 8 km3of water and 25 Gt of CO2.

Join us and #InvestInOurPlanet, let’s fight food waste!

If you want to learn more about food waste, please read the blog post: “Food Waste: Key facts we cannot ignore”.

Sources:

1. https://ourworldindata.org/food-ghg-emissions
2. https://www.unep.org/regions/north-america/regional-initiatives/promoting-sustainable-lifestyles
3. https://www.un.org/en/global-issues
4. https://freshinset.com/food-waste-key-facts-we-cannot-ignore/
5. https://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/article/wasting-food-feeds-climate-change
6. https://freshinset.com/food-waste-key-facts-we-cannot-ignore/
7. https://refed.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5e060ada59945afadbd7234ce&id=6c4af6a93a&e=73feb7b5ac
8. https://freshinset.com/food-waste-key-facts-we-cannot-ignore/
9. https://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/
10. https://www.unep.org/regions/north-america/regional-initiatives/promoting-sustainable-lifestyles
11. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2113884119