The extent of food waste generation across EU-27: Different calculation methods and the reliability of their results

Abstract

The reduction of food waste is seen as an important societal issue with considerable ethical, ecological and economic implications. The European Commission aims at cutting down food waste to one-half by 2020. However, implementing effective prevention measures requires knowledge of the reasons and the scale of food waste generation along the food supply chain. The available data basis for Europe is very heterogeneous and doubts about its reliability are legitimate. This mini-review gives an overview of available data on food waste generation in EU-27 and discusses their reliability against the results of own model calculations. These calculations are based on a methodology developed on behalf of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and provide data on food waste generation for each of the EU-27 member states, broken down to the individual stages of the food chain and differentiated by product groups. The analysis shows that the results differ significantly, depending on the data sources chosen and the assumptions made. Further research is much needed in order to improve the data stock, which builds the basis for the monitoring and management of food waste.

Food Waste Generation at Household Level: Results of a Survey among Employees of Two European Research Centers in Italy and Germany

“…The available studies use household surveys by means of questionnaires or interviews [8,[17][18][19][20][21], kitchen diaries [9,18,[22][23][24][25][26], waste composition analyses [11,[26][27][28] and calculations based on statistical data on food supply [14,27,29] or on municipal waste [15,16,30]. The methods used can be roughly assigned to two groups: (1) collection, sorting and analysis by a third party; or (2) measuring and reporting by the consumers themselves [25].…”

“…The intention of the new survey was to collect more recent information, including issues that have not also been covered by previous inquiries. Quantitative information on the generation of food waste in Germany-as well as in Italy-are mainly taken from calculations based on statistical data [16,29,30,37]. Against this backdrop it was a further concern of the survey to reflect the data collected by the survey against the results of calculations.…”

Food waste valorization options: opportunities from the bioeconomy

“…Overall, despite efforts made by international organizations and scholars, outcomes on food waste are hardly comparable, mostly because they often utilize different methods of data collection (surveys, statistical estimations, combination of both) and there is still no common adopted definition of food waste (Bräutigam et al 2014); other terms such as food loss and food wastage are commonly used. This obviously makes quantification and international comparisons difficult, with negative implications on strategies for tackling food waste (Falcone and Imbert 2017).…”

A systematic review of food losses and food waste generation in developed countries

“…The 'agricultural production' to 'distribution' parts of the FSC represent pre-consumer FLW estimates. Estimates ranged from 173·7 to 185·0 (kg/capita)/year (Brautigam et al, 2014;.…”

“…Brautigam et al (2014) adopted multipliers developed by to estimate FLW and used them to develop a EU-wide estimate of 125·8 (kg/capita)/year for these two parts of the FSC, which represented 44% of their overall estimate of EU FLW.…”