Food waste is an issue of importance to global food security and good environmental governance, directly linked with all aspects of sustainability (e.g. availability of resources, increasing costs and health). There is a pressing need to prevent food waste to make the transition to a resource efficient Europe. Previous studies show the necessity for more consistent and comparable data in order to decrease the uncertainties and making it possible to better understand the magnitude of the problem, and the scale of the potential opportunities. The results of this study indicate that EU-28 produce about 100 Mtonnes of food waste every year, and that about 45% of this is generated from households.

In this study data has been obtained using a combination of national waste statistics and findings from selected research studies. The data obtained has been filtered to ensure that it was aligned to the FUSIONS definitional framework and food waste definition and used a robust methodology; hence that data is comparable between countries.

The results indicate that EU-28 produce about 100 Mtonnes of food waste every year, and that about 45% of this is generated from households. This estimate is for 2012 and includes food waste according to FUSIONS’ definitional framework. There is a moderately high uncertainty around the estimate; the approximate 95% confidence interval is ± 23 million tonnes.

The Global Warming Potential (GWP) of current food waste for EU in 2011 is estimated to at least around 227 MT of CO2-Equivalents (Eq.). This is 16% of the total GWP of food utilization in EU in 2011. Further details will be found in report “Criteria for and baseline assessment of environmental and socio-economic impacts of food waste” that will be published during autumn 2015.

A key recommendation from this exercise for accurately quantifying food waste in EU-28 is to increase the number of EU member states that measure food waste robustly. This recommendation applies to all sectors; however, the lack of data was particularly acute for the primary production sector.

Follow the link below to the full study.