International Day of Awareness for Food Loss and Waste
Happy International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste. On the 29th of September, food waste champions around the world are celebrating the fight against food waste.
Food Waste Innovation teamed up with NZ Food Waste Citizens of 12.3 (with the help of student volunteers) to recognise International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste by creating visual displays on campus in Dunedin, highlighting the environmental impacts of food waste. We also had Upcycled ginger beer on tap, made by our Upcycled Food Lab using surplus bread and citrus fruit that would otherwise have gone to waste. Read the article in the Otago Daily Times.
Each display highlighted a resource wasted when food is thrown away. These were set up in three locations across campus between 9am-4pm (29th September). Keep scrolling down to read more about each display.
Food waste by EMISSIONS Our “Olympic Podium of Polluters” showed food wasted in the average household is second only to the average annual emissions of a car, and is followed by New Zealand’s cows.
Food Waste by VOLUME. The average household wastes around 3 shopping trolleys full of food each year. This wastes food, money and packaging!
Food waste by WATER We set up a visual representation of how much water is wasted when we throw away 1kg of potatoes, one of the most wasted food items in NZ homes.
Food waste by ENERGY Running 5.7 fridges for one year uses the same amount of energy as food that is wasted per capita in New Zealand!
A huge thank you to our Student Action Coordinator David and his team of volunteers who were the brains and the muscle behind this awesome awareness event!
Image Gallery
About the Displays:
Food Waste by VOLUME
This display represented the average amount of food thrown away – three full shopping trolleys worth – in New Zealand households every year (Love Food Hate Waste NZ). Taken altogether, the total amount of food waste annually in New Zealand (122,547 tonnes) would be enough to feed everyone in Dunedin for two years!
We used empty packaging from typical household and supermarket products, to represent the fact that food manufacture still creates massive demand for single-use packaging. If you’re wondering about how much all this wasted food costs, it’s approximately $872 million (NZD). This money wasted due to food waste would be enough to provide all school-aged children in the country with free school lunches for THREE full years. Yet, the way it is at the moment, around 1 in 5 children in Aotearoa New Zealand instead currently suffer from food insecurity (NZ Health Survey, “Household Food Insecurity Among Children”, 2019).
Thank you to Countdown Dunedin Central, for the generous lending of unused shopping trolleys and shipping pellets for use in this display.
Food waste by EMISSIONS
At this display was our “Olympic Podium of Polluters”. On top is an average New Zealand car, every one of which accounts for approximately 2.76 tonnes of C02-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere every year (Love Food Hate Waste).
Next up, in second place, is food waste, according to a comprehensive study on the ‘whole of lifecycle’ emissions embedded in food waste in New Zealand. This includes emissions at the production, transportation, and consumption stages, in addition to the harmful methane emissions caused by food ending up in landfill and emissions from industries associated with food production, such as fertilizer. By this measure, every tonne of food waste in New Zealand – of which there are 122,547 tonnes, by conservative estimates – accounts for 2.66 tonnes of C02-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions (WasteMINZ ; ref. In Briefing to investigate food waste in New Zealand, a.k.a. the “Mirosa Report”, NZ Government Report of the Environment Committee 2020).
Coming in third is the much-villified NZ dairy cow, burping and farting its way to 2.23 tonnes of C02-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions every year, per cow. It should be noted that this statistic is referring only to methane emissions from enteric fermentation from Aotearoa New Zealand’s dairy cattle population.
Thank you to Caversham Toy Library for their support and generous loan of some fantastic toys for us to use in this display.
Food Waste by WATER
This display was of 250ltrs of fresh water. This is the average (global) water footprint required to produce 1kg of potatoes (Hoekstra 2008, “The Water Footprint of Food”). This is dwarfed by other common, but far more ‘water-hungry’ foods around the world, such as rice: 1kg of which accounts for 3,400 litres, and almost all of which is imported into New Zealand from elsewhere.
Potatoes are one of the most commonly discarded foods in New Zealand households every year. They are the most-wasted fresh produce item, and they rank 3rd among all food types (behind bread and leftovers), with an estimated total of 6,365 tonnes of avoidable waste, per year, through domestic kerbside collections (Love Food Hate Waste NZ and Potatoes NZ).
Thank you to Dunedin City Council Waste and Environmental Solutions for the generous use of these emergency water containers
Food Waste by ENERGY
Here we had displayed 5.7 standard kitchen fridge-freezers. Keeping all of these fridges running, for an entire year, would require the same energy input as the amount of energy that is wasted, per person, per year, due to food that goes uneaten in New Zealand.
The ‘embodied energy’ of food waste in New Zealand is not only electricity, either. In fact, it gets worse: it’s mostly fossil fuels, with oil, coal and natural gas supplying the vast majority of energy inputs in New Zealand’s food system (Fitzgerald, Norton and Stephenson, 2016, “Future-proofing New Zealand’s Agricultural Food System”, University of Otago Centre for Sustainability).
In other words: we’re wasting a huge amount of non-renewable energy whenever food, produced in New Zealand, goes to waste!
Thank you to Waste Management for generously allowing us to intercept these fridges, which had been dumped, from the Waste Management Transfer Station.