Time to sort out Food Waste, says TOMRA

Almost a third of all food produced worldwide is never eaten, leading to 1.3 billion tons of food waste each year. This includes around 45 per cent of all fruit and vegetables and 20 per cent of meat. Just one quarter of this wasted food could feed the 795 million chronically hungry people around the world.

Of this waste, over half (54 per cent) is lost in upstream processes, including agricultural production and post-harvest handling. The other 46 per cent is wasted in processing, distribution and consumption. With the cost of this totaling US$750 billion per year to the global economy, addressing food wastage offers significant potential to ease pressures on natural resources and the tightening balance of supply and demand.

In September 2015, the United Nations (UN) met to agree to reduce per capita food waste by half by 2030. This set a new precedent by including food loss and food waste reduction within the UN’s global development goals.

Food waste can appear in various forms. In developing countries there are high levels of food loss, which is unintentional wastage, often due to poor equipment, transportation and infrastructure. In established economies, there are also high levels of food waste, caused by food being thrown away by consumers because they have purchased too much, or by retailers who reject food because of the need to meet size and shape standards.

As a leading manufacturer of sensor-based food sorting systems, TOMRA Sorting Food is acutely aware of the food waste issue and works closely with farmers, processors and retailers to achieve the objective of reducing food waste.

In conclusion, Steve explains that TOMRA Sorting Food is continuing to develop sustainable solutions with its customers and many other companies:

“The discrepancy between demand and supply - a major cause of food wastage - ranges from farmers not finding a market for their products and leaving them to rot in the field, to supermarkets reducing product orders last minute, leaving producers with unsalable products.”

“There will always be areas for improvement. By identifying where waste occurs and treating it properly, we must ease the pressure on natural resources and reduce the amount of food produced worldwide which is never eaten.”