Thursday, June 4, 2009

Crawling for what they Waste


UK Wasted Food Stats

2,138 UK households suggest that Britons dump £9bn of avoidable waste each year - a high percentage of which was food. 60% of dumped food is untouched and at least £1bn worth of food wasted in the UK is still “in date”. Some key findings:

*Bakery goods made up 19%, by weight, of all avoidable food waste.
*Vegetables contributed 18%.
*Meat and fish also made up a large proportion - 18% - of the total money wasted on food.
*5,500 whole chickens were thrown away each day in the UK.
*The two most significantly wasted foods were potatoes and bread.
*1.3m unopened yoghurt pots are disposed every day.
*Mixed foods like ready meals made up of 21% of the total cost, with 40,000 wasted per year.

Even householders who are adamant that their household wastes no food at all are throwing away 195 pounds of avoidable food a year.” That represents roughly one third of all food purchased. 7 million slices of bread, 2.8 million tomatoes, 5.1 million potatoes, 4.4 million apples every single day.
Source: Waste & Resources Action Programme

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U.S. Wasted Food Stats

According to the US Department of Agriculture, up to one-fifth of America's food goes to waste each year, with an estimated 130 pounds of food per person ending up in landfills. The annual value of this lost food is estimated at around $31 billion But the real story is that roughly 49 million people could have been fed by those lost resources.
- A Citizen's Guide to Food Recovery-

Over 41 billion pounds of food have been wasted this year.
America’s Second Harvest-

On average, American households waste 14 percent of their food purchases. Fifteen percent of that includes products still within their expiration date but never opened.
–University of Arizona-

An average family of four tosses out $1,039 annually - regardless of income, ethnicity, education and other socio-economic factors.
– University of Arizona-

14% of food that comes into a household ends up going out as waste. And of that 14% deemed waste, another 14% is perfectly good food that’s still in its original packaging.
–University of Arizona-

The amount of food required to eliminate hunger in the U.S. is only 5 billion pounds annually.
-Feeding America-

If just 5 percent of food scraps were recovered, it would equal a day’s worth of food for 4 million people; recovery of 25 percent would feed 20 million.
USDA-

The total U.S. food surplus could satisfy “every empty stomach in Africa”.
-U.N. World Food Programme-

It costs the nation around $1 billion annually to dispose of all its food waste.
– EPA-

Every year more than 350 billion pounds of edible food is available for human consumption in the United States. Of that total, nearly 100 billion pounds - including fresh vegetables, fruits, milk, and grain products - are lost to waste by retailers, restaurants, and consumers.
– Unnamed Official Survey-

Additional downside of wasting food:

And you don’t have to dump it in landfills. Left to rot, food releases methane, a greenhouse gas the EPA cites as 21 times more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide. Landfills are the largest human-related source of methane in the U.S., accounting for 34% of methane emissions. –EPA-

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