Food waste represents 8% of global CO2 emissions and costs a total of 750 million USD - same as the GDP of Turkey. The UN estimates that a third of our food, or around 1.3 billion tons per year is wasted from farm to table.Īnd this has a considerable impact on the environment. Knowledge needed to achieve UN Goalįood waste is a subject that attracts growing political and popular attention. Taking consumer waste as an example, it is in people's homes where the most food is thrown out however, most of the stop food waste initiatives are targeted at food waste in shops or restaurants. This lack of basic data and knowledge about food waste is an obstacle when we need to find the most effective strategies for reducing food waste. In his work looking through the data from around the world, Gang Liu came across a Danish report from the Copenhagen Resource Institute, which shows that existing Danish data on food waste are between 15-25 years old, while food waste data for the various stages of the supply chain, especially in wholesalers, are even older and rarer. Lack of knowledge in DenmarkĪlso in Denmark, we do not quite know how much food we actually throw into the trash bin. This signals a high degree of uncertainty in the existing global database on food waste, underlines Gang Liu. Many research articles use old figures, and more than half of the articles are based exclusively on secondary sources. We discovered that data collection is focused on a handful of countries, especially the USA, UK, and Nordic countries. Missing Food, Missing Data? A Critical Review of Global Food Losses and Food Waste Data The results have been assembled in the report Missing Food, Missing Data? A Critical Review of Global Food Losses and Food Waste Data, which has been recently published in the prestigious journal Environmental Science and Technology. By Birgitte Dalgaard, We don't know nearly enough about how much food we are throwing out and which initiatives are helping to reduce food waste, says Associate Professor Gang Liu from the SDU Centre for Life Cycle Engineering.Īlong with colleagues from universities in Europe, the USA, and China, Gang Liu has examined all available food waste data in the literature between 19 for 84 countries.