Imagine counting out $500 of your hard-earned cash, a soft wad of tens, twenties and fifties, and throwing it straight in the rubbish bin. You’d take it as a sign of madness. Yet that’s the amount of food each of us bins every year.
We tell ourselves that we are clean and green but, as a country, we waste like there’s no tomorrow. The OECD dubs us a “leader” in waste production among its member nations, meaning we produce more waste per person than most other countries in the group. At least we’re top of the bill in something. We dumped 3.2 million tonnes of waste into landfills in 2006, according to a Statistics NZ survey, 23% of which was organic waste. And among that, the below-the-waterline iceberg of waste, is food.
If, like Australians, we typically bin 13% of our total food purchases each year and we have no reason to think we are any different from our neighbours more than $2 billion of food is wasted. That’s $465 per person per year thrown in the rubbish. And that conservative figure a 2006 estimate suggested 40% of refrigerator food is typically dumped is household waste; it takes no account of the amount lost in the commercial production-distribution-retail cycle, which is certain to be massively larger. Full article.