A friend sent me this useful waste diversion presentation created by the Biodegradable Products Institute. The Power Point doc, which takes a bit to load, has some eye-opening statistics about how much food is in our trash.
In slide six, we see that food scraps make up the largest portion of the waste stream. It’s the […]

Filipinos, or Pinoys, waste 1.2 million tons of rice each day. That amounts to a spoonful of rice per person, according to this article in the Philippine Star. In response, the Filipino government has launched a rice conservation program and an advocacy campaign.
Well, folks, we Americans waste about 40 percent of all the food we […]

London’s The Independent reported on Sunday that Britain throws away half the food it produces. Whoa.
Here are the numbers: 20 million tonnes of food wasted per year at a cost of £20 billion pounds.
The US is said to waste between 40 and 50 percent of all food it produces, according to research done […]

This article in Idaho’s Twin Falls Times-News provides insight into why restaurants think waste is “inevitable.”
Unfortunately, the piece’s author allowed two common myths to go unchallenged. First, that food recovery groups won’t keep donated food at the right temperature, allowing it to dip into the bacteria danger zone. Most food recovery groups employ refrigerated trucks […]

I’ve often come across waste studies that estimate how much food isn’t eaten in a city or state. Since researchers aren’t sorting and weighing food waste at every home and restaurant, I often wonder how they come up with the estimates.
Now I have an answer. Page five of this 2002 Massachusetts food waste study lists […]

The trayless college dining experiment is spreading and so are the media hits. An article in Inside Higher Ed about the practice led to a brief blog post on The Wall Street Journal’s site.
The Inside Higher Ed piece provided a nice detail to illustrate that some students, notably big eaters, oppose traylessness. Members of the […]

‘I waste food, so what?’
That’s one reaction I get when I tell people that I’m researching food waste. Countering that argument from a logical perspective can be difficult, as I have a gut reaction against squandering (as do many people).
On that logical path, limiting food waste matters because farming and freight uses oil, water, time and money, pollutes the air […]

From Reed College to the National Review, we’re really spanning the political spectrum this week. The conservative magazine has pretty fair article on how the Federal School Lunch Program wastes food and money.
Wasted food costs the government $600 million every year, with fruits and vegetables accounting for 42 percent of that waste.
This G.A.O. report supplies those figures. […]

In the Department of Unsubstantiated Claims, this post says America wastes 70 percent of its food! Now, I’m the first person to say we waste too much food, but that sourceless number takes things a bit too far. (I say ’more than 40 percent,’ as the University of Arizona anthropologist Timothy Jones estimates between 40 and […]

The media just loves the freegan story. And why wouldn’t they? The idea that people can subsist on what we throw away really intrigues people. This BBC article has some interesting U.K. data packed into one paragraph:
Each year 6.7 million tonnes of food is thrown out. Half is perfectly edible and in a lifetime its estimated […]