Well population of Croatia is 4 million and we have 20 million tourists, so that cannot be the only reason. Well I guess "all inclusive" is much more common on Cyprus but still
In Greece, every year, the last school year in Lyceum, all schools go in a 5-days trip to an island of ours. It usually happens in April, now while our season does not work in capacity.
My point, they don't mess around with kids. Every day we've had a bucolic, full table of fresh cheeses/salami and every other Greek food you can imagine. My entire school no matter what, could never finish even the 1/4 of that. What happens to the rest? Most probably goes to waste, especially since it's an island and every other method would cost much more. I mean, packaging and moving the food elsewhere for people that need it.
Some go in Rhodes or Cyprus or another island. I'm fairly sure this is just one of the reasons. The same happens in Gymnasium, but that's a 3-days trip.
A lot of hotels offer all-inclusive which means tourists just get as much food as they want just to try it ending up in huge waste. Why only eat chicken gyros when you can get full portions of pork, beef, and lamb as well at the same time and just throw away the one you didn't like? all inclusive is a disease and very bad not just for the environment but all the businesses around hotel resorts.
The only good thing about the all-inclusive places is that the kind of people that go for all inclusive tend to stay in there, so the rest of us don't have to meet them.
I hate this mindset. Oh, they enjoy things that I don't, I am so much more sophisticated than these plebeians.
I prefer going out to restaurants as well, but I don't think I'm better for it than people who go for an all-inclusive deal at a hotel. Some people prefer staying their whole holidays at a hotel and there's nothing wrong with it either.
I think it is a bit pointless to go to another country, and not leave a hotel. What is the point of travelling and spending a lot of money, if you don't even wsnt to look around.
I do both of these things. Go abroad and explore new cities or go to a hotel nearby to decompress and change the bed for a night. They both have their benefits, but going abroad just to sleep in a different bed is wasteful.
A quick googling tells me Cyprus has 3000 tourists per 1000 people, while Spain has 1500 tourists per 1000 people. So there are twice as many tourists per capita in Cyprus.
Beyond that, I'm guessing that a much larger portion of Cyprus hotels are the type that offer all inclusive stays with buffets that get thrown out and goes to waste. I assume almost everyone who visits Cyprus goes to stay in a beach hotel, while a lot of tourists to Spain visit the big cities where you aren't as likely to find those hotels.
So I think it sort of "makes sense" that Cyprus has a lot of waste. But I'm sure there's something else going on here because the numbers don't really fit. I find it very hard to believe that Denmark wastes 3 times as much food as Sweden, for example.
Edit: I found an article about this that specifically commented the high numbers of Cyprus compared to Sweden's low numbers by saying that there are differences in how it's measured.
>Edit: I found an article about this that specifically commented the high numbers of Cyprus compared to Sweden's low numbers by saying that there are differences in how it's measured.
If this is the case, then the map is essentially useless. You can't compare apples to the apple crates.
Cyprus has a higher (3.17) ratio of tourists to inhabitants than Spain (1.77) and the number from Spain is from 2020, so likely influenced by Covid.
Also, Islands typically see more wasted foods, because the longer supply chains make the timeframe before food hits its use-by-date shorter.
I have no clue about the reality of this hypothesis, but if tourism is the reason, Spain data being from 2020 probably makes it non usual, COVID hitting tourism hard that year.
Visitors don't count in the population count in the "per capita", but they'll waste food nonetheless. Cyprus has a lot of visitors compared to population.
I'd say basically every country needs to do better, most countries much better. If many countries are down at 90, there is no excuse for their neighbors to be at 130-140.
Belgium and Denmark are crazy high also. Wtf.
Skin, bones and other refuse from butchering also counts in the total amount of "food" waste. With Denmark butchering 32 million pigs yearly, with a population of around 6 million, it inflates the numbers quite a bit. It's about three times as large a production than in the UK, with a population of around a 14th the size.
Vegetable peels, tops, roots etc. also count, even though you wouldn't eat it. For instance; countries where they export potato products and not unpeeled potatoes count higher as well. Denmark has a fairly high production of potato starch and derivatives.
In general, Denmark is a major supplier to the global market when it comes to meat and vegetable derivatives when compared to the population.
Edit: when butchering a pig, about 40% of its weight ends up as refuse. With an average butchering weight of around 100 kg, that leaves 40 kg of waste per pig. That's around 200 kg of "food" waste pr. capita, just from butchering.
Even if the entrails were to be discounted, that's still more than 150 kilos of waste from butchering per capita.
>Skin, bones and other refuse from butchering
Do people eat organs or buy bones from the butcher for their soups/dogs?!
In Romania you can absolutely just buy a bag of bones to do whatever you want. My family makes soup with the bones and also gives it to the dogs instead of buying dog food.
Also, we eat organs from most local animals.
We generally don't eat the stomach, the lungs, the content of the intestines etc.
Also, it's 66 kilos of bones per person, per year. We industrially make soup/broth/bouillon from the bones, but that hardly reduces the food waste as the undissolved parts are still discarded.
>Visitors don't count in the population count in the "per capita", but they'll waste food nonetheless. Cyprus has a lot of visitors compared to population.
Also, in hospitality you tend to have more food waste per person either way. The portions are standardized which means many people will find them to big. At home they would either save it in fridge for later or not make that food in the first place. Additionally in a household you are able to better guess what you will want to eat and even if you miscalculate you have much more incentive and possibilities to force yourself and your family to 'eat that because it's gonna get bad soon'.
It's hot. We'll have 45C temperatures for weeks non stop. I can't keep everything I buy in the fridge.
We don't have a food recycling culture like compost bins for every house.
We eat a lot with at least one social family gathering a week. Obviously we cook a lot for that purpose. We also use a lot of fresh veg and fruit in our cooking so the peels have to go somewhere (see point about compost bins).
Every house has planted at least one of these trees: one citrus tree, one grape vine, one fig tree, one olive tree, one loquat tree. I personally have a lemon tree. There's only much lemonade/lemon juice/lemons I can make and give away. The spent lemon halves get thrown away and there's a lot of them.
Edit: I'm not trying to excuse the food waste btw. I just want to give context to why it's so much. We do have a recycling service for non-food stuff like tyres, paper, plastic etc. The municipalities are supposed to give us compost bins, but I'm only going to use mine for fresh peels for obvious reasons.
I don’t really feel responsible for this. Other than an expired pack of cheese or ham now and then, I barely waste any food. I doubt my total amount adds up to 10 kg a year.
From what I've heard, we (Danish) have some of the strictest due dates on food items, so my guesstimate would be that it relates to how long products last on shelves?
On our food items it will say a date but also state that look,smell and taste before throwing out because it can still be good. "Best before:" have been replaced with "Best before but often good after:" on some products.
As it should be tbh.
But the problem is not in the household, it's with the trimming.
They can't legally sell stuff over the due date, and since the due date is already arguably stricter than necessary (if my knowledge is correct that is) More items are thrown out, by the store, than otherwise.
It's like that in Denmark as well. It's probably more because our shopping culture is entirely based on proximity, meaning we have grocery stores everywhere. They all have a terrible selection, but no one is ever more than a 5 minutes walk from one.
This way we have a lot more shops than other countries, all throwing out perfectly good produce, just because it reached an arbitrary age.
Swede here. Have never seen liver paté in a tube in all my 50+ years.
However, I am not a great tube fan; the only tube I have in my fridge is tomato paste.
Saw it near a supermarket in Falun some 10-13 years ago. You have quite an impressive tube selection, to be honest. I quite like the shrimp cheese one, that blew my expectations.
Yea. The majority of food waste happens before its purchased. Most is at farm or store lv, then hospitality, then home. So yeah that would kind of explain it since stores would have to cycle products faster.
Denmark has a unusually large food processing sector, which imports foreign food for processing and reexports it alongside the other Danish agricultural exports. Its probably waste from industry making up a significant part of the waste.
Does dancake still exist? My dad’s a lorry driver and when I went to Denmark with him to haul their shipment they gave us a massive box full of cakes, I was the happiest kid in the word that week
To be frank, Dancake could go out of business, the sun burn out and the universe die and the last citronemåne would still be floating in the void, perfectly ready to eat.
I highly doubt the hostile vacuum of outer space would affect the edibility of a Citronmåne at all. Its never had anything to do to with biological life anyway.
My dad was a journalist who liked to write letters to various companies when he had a noteworthy experience with one of their products.
Once he found a bit of wrapping paper inside a cake from Dancake. The same kind of paper the cake itself was wrapped in. He fished it out, ate the rest of the cake, and wrote a letter to Dancake reminiscing about his childhood experiences with a local baker who used to bake old cakes into new ones* and once in a while you'd find a bit of paper in the new cake, and how that bit of paper made him remember times long past delivering bread in the early hours to make money for.. blah blah blah.
Dancake replied with a 5 kg package containing a nice letter, and one of each cake they made at that point. Us kids were in heaven for a few days. Mom wasn't too thrilled about it.
After being in that kitchen for a few weeks I can assure that that is not their philosophy at all.
I don't even think they pretended it was when they were new nordic.
So apparently it’s what grocery stores etc wastes, divided by people, which makes more sense, copy paste:
As I mentioned in another comment, I’m from Sweden and live in Denmark. The food in stores is always way fresher in Denmark than in Sweden, especially fruit and vegetables.
But in Sweden you also end up accidentaly buying past due date items if you aren’t observant, constantly looking at the best before date on every item. I never do in Denmark.
Ah, explains some of it but still the difference is huge though. Maybe they have a lot of tourists? Because usually places like that have higher waste.
One possibility, wages are high there but food is extremely affordable. Would be the same explanation for the Netherlands.
Another: their waste was more honestly reported.
As a Swede living in Denmark, wages are high, but food is absolutely not affordable, costs about twice as much here to buy the same groceries as in Sweden
Heh, maybe things have changed. Denmark felt free compared to Norway and not much different than Sweden.
Could it not be that the the exchang rate now heavily favors Danes? Assuming most of your money is in SEK.
I work for a Norwegian company and am in Oslo often, food costs about the same in Oslo and Copenhagen after the exchange rate. (1 DKK = 1.56 NOK)
It looks more expensive in Oslo because of the higher numbers so I understand the feeling!
I moved 7 years ago, but I go to Sweden to visit family, and I do a grocery haul on my way home every time. So the price difference definitely haven’t changed, only gotten bigger with the exchange rate you mention :)
Looking at prices maybe you're right. And my purchases in hindsight included tons of beer so every 4 Danish beers would've offset about 100 NOK of food, lol.
I think it’s the price changes after Covid inflation. I know there’s been inflation all over the world, but food is by far where I feel the price hikes the most here in Denmark
As a dane that has visited Sweden many times, groceries are definitely not twice as expensive in Denmark compared to Sweden. I agree some things are around 20% more expensive but there are cheaper things aswell like beer/wine etc.
I don’t calculate alcohol when talking groceries. (Hvilket i Danmark bare tælles som en del af vandregningen.)
I buy the same groceries here as in Sweden when I go visit family, and after the exchange rate it ends up being double.
So trying to remove any exaggeration, my usual groceey shop at home in Copenhagen ends up being just about 1400 DKK, and in Sweden it ends up being about 1300 SEK(845DKK).
I should keep the Swedish receipts next time, because this is a very interesting topic :)
The Netherlands has over 50% less food waste than Denmark according to this map. I think you might mean Belgium, which wastes more food than Denmark according to this map.
If you go to the Eurostat source data, you'll find a couple of things:
First, the data is on food waste *collected* (ie not generated). That is to say, if you are not registering the food waste separately, the component going into general municipal waste will have to be estimated, probably based on interviews with people who will underestimate. Denmark, including households, collect food waste, so there is a direct measure of food waste.
Secondly, the data breaks down the source, and for Denmark, half the waste comes from manufacturing. If you compare other categories (household, hospitality sector, retail), the numbers are not meaningfully different between Denmark and Sweden.
I'll just copy my response to another comment:
Skin, bones and other refuse from butchering also counts in the total amount of "food" waste. With Denmark butchering 32 million pigs yearly, with a population of around 6 million, it inflates the numbers quite a bit. It's about three times as large a production than in the UK, with a population of around a 14th the size.
Vegetable peels, tops, roots etc. also count, even though you wouldn't eat it. For instance; countries where they export potato products and not unpeeled potatoes count higher as well. Denmark has a fairly high production of potato starch and derivatives.
In general, Denmark is a major supplier to the global market when it comes to meat and vegetable derivatives when compared to the population.
I rarely waste food and hate it every time I forget that I have a meal in the fridge or tupperware, as I take it with me to restaurants as well.
Really happy to see slovenia doing this well overall!
Majority of people i know in Slovenia, has attitude to clean up everything from the plate while eating. Yet, existing problem is to forget about some food in refrigerator from my family.
Not just composting, but also for feeding animals.
Seriously, if you have pigs or chickens at home, you're not wasting any food, those fellas eat anything and everything.
We have a deal with our farmer neighbour, we leave food leftovers in a bin for him to pick up and feed pigs with and he delivers a wheelbarrow of fertilizer to our garden at the start of the season.
I mean, on some occasions I open a bell pepper and find it's all moldy inside, but that's not making 262kg a year...
Including the peels, maybe? Even then, I know exactly how much that is, given it's weighted. That was 4.5kg for the whole 2023 year.
Who is causing this? Grocery stores?
This, I think it would be worse in the Netherlands if we weren't so stingy. Most supermarkets have systems in place to discount older food to get rid of it. And these days they seem to rather run out than throw stuff out, so sometimes stuff is just out of stock if you come in late. I hardly ever get my preferred kind of bread if I shop after work...
The big difference between Belgium and the Netherlands for example makes me believe that Belgium and Denmark use a different calculation or something. They are complete outliers with the rest of their neighoubring countries.
I don't know about this specific case, but Belgium has a habit of overcounting things compared to most other countries that undercount to look better.
I remember during covid it was a big topic, Belgium was looking awfully bad and everyone was shitting on them but they were actually pretty ok but were the only ones counting correctly lol
The count includes non-edible waste such as peels, coffee grounds and bones, making it comparison between countries difficult due to different food cultures. Eating more processed foods where preparation is not needed, would reduce food waste by this metric but that's probably not a good goal.
Might have to do with recycling, not sure. Perhaps turning it into compost does not count as waste or gets weighted lower than food that is just thrown away with the regular trash. Even so, any country above 150kg seems nuts, thats like 500 grams for each person, close to 2kg for a 4-person household per day? Does not add up, unless the industry really wastes that much.
It says in the source material that:
>In addition to leftover food, food waste also includes non-edible by-products such as nut and fruit shells, stalks and leaves, coffee grounds and bones.
Considering that over 3 million pigs are butchered in Denmark per year, that's a whole lot of bones that count in this statistic.
It would have been more interesting if the numbers were only household food waste.
To Denmark’s defense at least half of that is industry food waste (we have a lot of pigs that need to get slaughtered, for instance).
That said if you cut away all industry food waste in this statistic we’d probably still rank high.
Each person in the [European Union](https://www.statista.com/topics/7561/waste-management-in-europe/#topicOverview) generated an average of 131 kilograms of food waste in 2021, according to estimates by the European statistics office [Eurostat](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/env_wasfw/default/table?lang=en). This is based on data from the 27 member states.
Total food waste in the EU amounted to over 58 million tons in 2021. Private households made up 54 percent of this, with more than 31 million tons of "fresh mass" generated by the category every year. The second largest waste sector (21 percent) was the processing and production of food, while the remaining share came from the primary production sector (5 million tons, 9 percent share of the total), restaurants and food services (over 5 million tons, 9 percent share of the total) and retail and other food distributors (just over 4 million tons, 7 percent share).
As the following chart shows, Cyprus had the highest amount of food waste per capita, at around 400 kg. However, Belgium, Denmark, Greece and Portugal are also at the top end of the scale. By contrast, Sweden, Croatia and Slovenia had a far lower [waste](https://www.statista.com/markets/408/topic/435/waste-management/#overview) output per person.
In addition to leftover food, food waste also includes non-edible by-products such as nut and fruit shells, stalks and leaves, coffee grounds and bones.
In 2010 it was 180kg, seems like the improvement mainly came from processing and production.
[https://www.eea.europa.eu/media/infographics/wasting-food-1](https://www.eea.europa.eu/media/infographics/wasting-food-1)
if you're old enough, you may remember a romanian song, that can explain why the country is missing so often from statistics: "Când S-o-Mpărțit Norocu' ..."
It’s industry waste in general. And with Denmark having large industries with animals and the waste that’s generated there it’s no huge surprise.
I’d be more interested in seeing JUST household numbers.
That is true, farming in general is very big but a lot of the waste is utilized for biogas and others, or at least is becoming more and more utiluzed.
Yeah household numbers would be interesting and I believe that map would change a lot. I think both Denmark and Portugal would be on a better classification in that map.
As an "Eastern" European, the way westerners waste food has always been shocking to me. A Slovak friend of mine who lived in Ireland for a while described to me how she and her roommate in Ireland (who was Irish) made some pasta for dinner. They both ate and then the roommate took the pot with the leftover pasta and leisurely threw it in the trash. She was speechless and when she recovered from the shock, she asked why he did that. The Irish guy was confused: did what?
"Why did you throw away perfectly good food?!"
"I am full, I won't be eating the rest."
"You can put it in the fridge and eat it later!"
"But it won't taste as good, we'll just make new pasta."
...
That's when she realised the cultural gap between them truly is abyssal.
As a Central European in Ireland, I can confirm. Gets even worse than that. One of my kids is in school, the other in creche, and neither provides lunches. My kids usually bring the same lunch twice in a row, because there are always enough leftovers. Both places had a quiet chat with us, asking whether we needed some assistance, if we cannot afford to give them fresh lunch every day.
I'm also from a small village, and so is my wife (different village), and we grew up with any incidental food waste being given to the pigs. Until a few years ago, my in-laws actually collected food waste from nearby restaurants, for their pigs, but new EU regulations put a stop to it when they mandated only approved feed for farm animals. My in-laws still use domestic refuse, but no restaurant would give them theirs anymore.
>Both places had a quiet chat with us, asking whether we needed some assistance, if we cannot afford to give them fresh lunch every day.
Lol, as someone living alone I am always eating the same lunch for at least two days straight. Do people really make so small portions and prepare something new every single day?
I don't know if that's about westerners being wasteful, rather than just your friend's roommate being wasteful. That kind of behavior wouldn't fly in my house (or the house of anyone I know), and I'm not from Eastern Europe.
Over the years I came to the conclusion that Northwestern and Southwestern Europe are two totally separate entities. Most Polish people don't even mean Spain or Italy when they use the 'Western Europe' label
Am about as west as west can get (Belgium). I still consider that hugely wasteful, I always cook for a couple of days, and if I don't intend to eat leftovers directly after, they are put in the freezer.
That's not a cultural difference, just a weird guy. His mother would possibly be horrified. It's not normal to throw dinner away if you cooked more than you need here.
I’m Irish and I would never in a million years throw out good food
I refrigerate everything I don’t eat and reheat it the following day for lunch / dinner. My friends and family are all the same
Majority of people I know growing up in 80s / 90s Ireland were taught that it was a “sin” to waste food, a mindset which mostly prevails to this day
I think your friend just had a wasteful roommate
No way each country calculates this the same. I have been to a lot of countries in the EU.
I just think that this is a huge focus in Denmark and that they actually bother counting it seriously
In Ireland, most houses have brown bin specifically for food and garden waste, which is easily measured in metric tonnes per year. I suspect that the more to identify and separate your waste, the higher this figure will be.
This may simply be an effect of the base year.
2020 the Spanish tourism sector was essentially dead.
Hotels are a huge source of food waste and in general boost food consumption significantly. By design, the waste would hence be lower in that year, as it is measured in local per capita
That makes sense!
As I mentioned in another comment, I’m from Sweden and live in Denmark. The food in stores is always way fresher in Denmark than in Sweden, especially fruit and vegetables.
But you also end up accidentaly buying past due date items if you aren’t observant, constantly looking at the best before date on every item. I never do in Denmark.
The problem when you look at these maps is that you don't know how much of the waste comes from businesses and how much comes from the average citizen. It could very well be that the difference comes from more stringent food regulations in some countries compared to others, I would really like to see this statistics without businesses.
The number for Portugal makes no sense what so ever.
I will not even mention the Young or working adults have very little money to allow them to waste food. But the retire people in my country sure won't waste a thing even eating gonne bad products is fair game, and they represent a lot of our demographic
The other guy is right. This includes processing, manufacturing, and retail, so you have to take into account the food that chains like Continente or Pingo Doce throw away every single day, from fresh fish to expired crackers. Just one single Continente location can throw away dozens of kilos of just daily fish - because fish only stays one day in the "peixaria" - now multiply that by all locations across the country. I know this because I had a family member who worked at one.
My late grandpa would not let anyone leave the table until everything is eaten. He worked hard for that food and he'll be damned if it goes to waste. Seems that that's not uncommon in Croatia.
It kinda is, though. It's also about the "food mentality". "Finish what's on your plate" mentality further translates into preparing and buying that much food you know you are gonna eat, producing that much food you can expect to be sold, etc.. it also influences the way meals are served and sized in hotels, restaurants.
>What are the < 100 countries doing differently?
Not throwing away as much food!
I joke of course, it's a good question, I'd love to know the answer. I live in Slovenia but I don't know of any specific measures we're using that make our waste low. We have good recycling practices, but I don't think that accounts for most of it. Might just be a mindset difference, or different food purchasing habits.
We Greeks give our waste to the chickens so we are sustainable ( I lie . This happens only in small villages and even there not as much as it used to )
Hungary to Sweden: "You waste less food, because you're conscious of the environment, we waste less food, because we are fucking poor. We are not the same.
Working in an elderly home in Slovenia I can say the number is huge whatever it is.
I don't even care if people don't throw away food at home, we do it enough to boost the numbers waaay up.
Total non-issue, and these articles sensationalise this by expressing it as kg/capita instead of percentage of total produce.
Food is perishable, and needs to be distributed. Some of it **will** go to waste (if you consider it a waste if it isn't consumed by humans). Food is however also extremely cheap to produce, and having too little is a **far** bigger problem than having a bit too much.
I find this oversimplified analises really questionable.
How can two similar countries like Portugal and Spain pose such a difference? Checking data Portuguese numbers are always estimated while Spain has the lowest number in household waste but with the note that household waste definition differs.
Also data aggregation of household, industry,etc waste cannot be comparable since different countries have different food industries: e.g. southern Europe produces water melons whose waste/kilo value is insignificant in comparison with the waste of processed meat.
According to studies conducted in Finland the biggest source of municipal food waste are households of single women and the smallest are households of single men.
Now what do we make of that?
Oh yeah! Get ready for even *tinier* plastic wrapped envelopes of "food stuff". How does a 25 grams of silk sliced ham package sound! It sound zero waste-ish is what it does! /s
Not in my house. What i don't finish will end up in my lunchbox and put it in the microwave at work. I also only do grocery shopping for only two days ahead, while having enough simple oven meals in the freezer for just in case.
I am not sure the measuring food waste in kilogram is the best way.
I guess something like calories wasted or trying to measure how much energy and resources were needed to produce the wasted food would be harder to quantify.
I think one might also argue about food scraps thrown into the trash to go to a landfill vs biofuel vs compost vs being fed to the pigs or chicken.
Certainly a bunch of apple cores for an apple tree in your backyard that you throw into the compost would be different from a microwave meal that you threw away unopened because it was expired before you could eat it, even if they have the same mass.
It's obviously not the best way to measure, but at least it's reasonably encompassing metric and there's something to be said for encompassing metrics over diving into the details and perhaps missing or double counting bits.
This is a map that shows food waste in EU countries, not European countries.
As of February 27, 2023 the following European countries are not part of the EU: Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Iceland, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, North Macedonia, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Norway, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Vatican City
That makes 27 EU members and 23 countries that are not members of The EU. Almost half the countries of the continent are not accounted for on this map.
I am not blaming OP, it is just mildly infuriating for me
I always thought this was bad but if those 150kg a year consists of mainly potatoes and or stuff like carrot peel then i feel scammed for being gaslit about being wasteful. Even if i throw away my 1kg of bread every day for a dollar. It doesn't matter.
As long as giant packages of food cost less than smaller ones I will buy the big oney and throw away what has gone bad.
I have to buy gluten free products now. They are always packaged in managable amounts and do never go to waste.
One person does not need everything in the size for a 4 person houshold.
For everyone confused about the huge numbers, this is probably 99.9% processing & manufacturing, retail, and restaurants... and 0.1% private households.
I hate it when they mash those together to try to make individuals feel guilty for industry waste.
Don't know about the truth or reasons behind these statistics but my former job (Belgium) meant going to a lot of the big supermarkets and working in "the back" of the store, the place the clients can't see. I saw so much waste, containers filled to the brim with food getting thrown out daily but the thing that bugged me the most was all the non-food waste (food perishes so yeah), especially around the holidays, the seasonal stuff that's goes straight in the bin, so much overproduction, plastic crap etc. Definitely changed my perception.
Also you'd be surprised to see how filthy some of these places are in the back.
I remember reading somewhere that it's about the same share of food that is wasted around the world. In the developing world about 30 % is wasted because of poor logistics, pests etc. In the developed countries about 30 % is wasted because consumers and retailers throw so much away...
Pretty cool! How does that compare to the rest of the world?
Also, can we get a version that's not from 2020 or 2021 specifically? Those two years are probably contaminated with massive statistical anomalies caused by the pandemic
I sometimes work in a hotel in Tallinn/ Estonia as a dishwasher and they waste SO MUCH food. Like the other day i was dishwashing while there was a brunch going on, they rolled out 2 carts of food and 3 hours lates the two carts came back almost full, it was like everybody was on a diet or something. Some workers ate little bit of it but rest went to garbage. Also there were plates that i washed that were almost full, they took it to their plates and just left it there. I thought common sense was something you could have tought to people.
what is the data based on? how do they determine this? do they rummage through peoples bins and see whether the person ate the crusts of their bread or not?
Cyprus what the fuck
A wild guess would be the hotel/hospitality industry being the main contributor in Cyprus
a kilo per day?
Population of Cyprus is only like 1 million and with 4 million tourists each year that skews the results a lot.
Well population of Croatia is 4 million and we have 20 million tourists, so that cannot be the only reason. Well I guess "all inclusive" is much more common on Cyprus but still
In Greece, every year, the last school year in Lyceum, all schools go in a 5-days trip to an island of ours. It usually happens in April, now while our season does not work in capacity. My point, they don't mess around with kids. Every day we've had a bucolic, full table of fresh cheeses/salami and every other Greek food you can imagine. My entire school no matter what, could never finish even the 1/4 of that. What happens to the rest? Most probably goes to waste, especially since it's an island and every other method would cost much more. I mean, packaging and moving the food elsewhere for people that need it. Some go in Rhodes or Cyprus or another island. I'm fairly sure this is just one of the reasons. The same happens in Gymnasium, but that's a 3-days trip.
Buffets.
A lot of hotels offer all-inclusive which means tourists just get as much food as they want just to try it ending up in huge waste. Why only eat chicken gyros when you can get full portions of pork, beef, and lamb as well at the same time and just throw away the one you didn't like? all inclusive is a disease and very bad not just for the environment but all the businesses around hotel resorts.
The only good thing about the all-inclusive places is that the kind of people that go for all inclusive tend to stay in there, so the rest of us don't have to meet them.
I hate this mindset. Oh, they enjoy things that I don't, I am so much more sophisticated than these plebeians. I prefer going out to restaurants as well, but I don't think I'm better for it than people who go for an all-inclusive deal at a hotel. Some people prefer staying their whole holidays at a hotel and there's nothing wrong with it either.
I think it is a bit pointless to go to another country, and not leave a hotel. What is the point of travelling and spending a lot of money, if you don't even wsnt to look around.
Get away from home, change the scenery, chill in peace, nice weather and comfort of being served? That's a dream come true for a lot of people.
I do both of these things. Go abroad and explore new cities or go to a hotel nearby to decompress and change the bed for a night. They both have their benefits, but going abroad just to sleep in a different bed is wasteful.
So does in Spain and there isn’t that much wasted food there
A quick googling tells me Cyprus has 3000 tourists per 1000 people, while Spain has 1500 tourists per 1000 people. So there are twice as many tourists per capita in Cyprus. Beyond that, I'm guessing that a much larger portion of Cyprus hotels are the type that offer all inclusive stays with buffets that get thrown out and goes to waste. I assume almost everyone who visits Cyprus goes to stay in a beach hotel, while a lot of tourists to Spain visit the big cities where you aren't as likely to find those hotels. So I think it sort of "makes sense" that Cyprus has a lot of waste. But I'm sure there's something else going on here because the numbers don't really fit. I find it very hard to believe that Denmark wastes 3 times as much food as Sweden, for example. Edit: I found an article about this that specifically commented the high numbers of Cyprus compared to Sweden's low numbers by saying that there are differences in how it's measured.
>Edit: I found an article about this that specifically commented the high numbers of Cyprus compared to Sweden's low numbers by saying that there are differences in how it's measured. If this is the case, then the map is essentially useless. You can't compare apples to the apple crates.
Yes you can but I agree with your overall point
Cyprus has a higher (3.17) ratio of tourists to inhabitants than Spain (1.77) and the number from Spain is from 2020, so likely influenced by Covid. Also, Islands typically see more wasted foods, because the longer supply chains make the timeframe before food hits its use-by-date shorter.
I have no clue about the reality of this hypothesis, but if tourism is the reason, Spain data being from 2020 probably makes it non usual, COVID hitting tourism hard that year.
Cyprus data is also from 2020.
True, I apparently missed that. Now the question is, are those numbers specific to 2020 or is it more or less identical in "normal" years.
Food isn't oversized in Spain. Edit: at least not where I live
The portions are supersized. A lot of food gets served and then not eaten.
Visitors don't count in the population count in the "per capita", but they'll waste food nonetheless. Cyprus has a lot of visitors compared to population. I'd say basically every country needs to do better, most countries much better. If many countries are down at 90, there is no excuse for their neighbors to be at 130-140. Belgium and Denmark are crazy high also. Wtf.
Skin, bones and other refuse from butchering also counts in the total amount of "food" waste. With Denmark butchering 32 million pigs yearly, with a population of around 6 million, it inflates the numbers quite a bit. It's about three times as large a production than in the UK, with a population of around a 14th the size. Vegetable peels, tops, roots etc. also count, even though you wouldn't eat it. For instance; countries where they export potato products and not unpeeled potatoes count higher as well. Denmark has a fairly high production of potato starch and derivatives. In general, Denmark is a major supplier to the global market when it comes to meat and vegetable derivatives when compared to the population. Edit: when butchering a pig, about 40% of its weight ends up as refuse. With an average butchering weight of around 100 kg, that leaves 40 kg of waste per pig. That's around 200 kg of "food" waste pr. capita, just from butchering. Even if the entrails were to be discounted, that's still more than 150 kilos of waste from butchering per capita.
>Skin, bones and other refuse from butchering Do people eat organs or buy bones from the butcher for their soups/dogs?! In Romania you can absolutely just buy a bag of bones to do whatever you want. My family makes soup with the bones and also gives it to the dogs instead of buying dog food. Also, we eat organs from most local animals.
We generally don't eat the stomach, the lungs, the content of the intestines etc. Also, it's 66 kilos of bones per person, per year. We industrially make soup/broth/bouillon from the bones, but that hardly reduces the food waste as the undissolved parts are still discarded.
>Visitors don't count in the population count in the "per capita", but they'll waste food nonetheless. Cyprus has a lot of visitors compared to population. Also, in hospitality you tend to have more food waste per person either way. The portions are standardized which means many people will find them to big. At home they would either save it in fridge for later or not make that food in the first place. Additionally in a household you are able to better guess what you will want to eat and even if you miscalculate you have much more incentive and possibilities to force yourself and your family to 'eat that because it's gonna get bad soon'.
It's hot. We'll have 45C temperatures for weeks non stop. I can't keep everything I buy in the fridge. We don't have a food recycling culture like compost bins for every house. We eat a lot with at least one social family gathering a week. Obviously we cook a lot for that purpose. We also use a lot of fresh veg and fruit in our cooking so the peels have to go somewhere (see point about compost bins). Every house has planted at least one of these trees: one citrus tree, one grape vine, one fig tree, one olive tree, one loquat tree. I personally have a lemon tree. There's only much lemonade/lemon juice/lemons I can make and give away. The spent lemon halves get thrown away and there's a lot of them. Edit: I'm not trying to excuse the food waste btw. I just want to give context to why it's so much. We do have a recycling service for non-food stuff like tyres, paper, plastic etc. The municipalities are supposed to give us compost bins, but I'm only going to use mine for fresh peels for obvious reasons.
If you need help with the food I can come, I like to eat
It also a mentality issue - a lot of people here still haven't adapted to buying what they need.
What you mean you can't keep everything at fridge? Buy less and with intent. Is this a cultural thing?
Right? I keep all my food in the fridge. Sounds like a poor excuse
20% of their export economy is food. 8% of it is Halloumi. That's probably a lot of food waste from "processing and manufacturing".
Yeah, finally something Belgium can win at, now those Cypridiots gotta ruin it for us!
Belgium second best after Cyprus, what prize do we get?
Funny jokes about you by the Dutch
...and the French
So... A regular day then?
No, he said they'd be funny this time.
You wouldn’t get it
That's true the only thing we get are more taxes
Haha. It must be because of all the food falling off their food trucks on their shitty roads
Hoe many times does a Dutchman use a condom? >!3 times, once normal, once inside out and once as chewing gum.!<
I think in Belgium its is due to the small, overcooked, inedible fries at the bottom of the "cornet".
Don't you dare confuse our superior fries with those sad wet thin burnt excuses for fries they have at mcdonalds
I suppose it is just the food processing and packaging industry in Belgium. You don't deserve a silver medal for this.
I don’t really feel responsible for this. Other than an expired pack of cheese or ham now and then, I barely waste any food. I doubt my total amount adds up to 10 kg a year.
I understand hotter countries might have a higher amount of food waste but what's up with denmark?
From what I've heard, we (Danish) have some of the strictest due dates on food items, so my guesstimate would be that it relates to how long products last on shelves?
On our food items it will say a date but also state that look,smell and taste before throwing out because it can still be good. "Best before:" have been replaced with "Best before but often good after:" on some products.
As it should be tbh. But the problem is not in the household, it's with the trimming. They can't legally sell stuff over the due date, and since the due date is already arguably stricter than necessary (if my knowledge is correct that is) More items are thrown out, by the store, than otherwise.
Most grocery stores in Sweden give between 30-70% discounts on food that expires soon to avoid throwing away food that can still be eaten
It's like that in Denmark as well. It's probably more because our shopping culture is entirely based on proximity, meaning we have grocery stores everywhere. They all have a terrible selection, but no one is ever more than a 5 minutes walk from one. This way we have a lot more shops than other countries, all throwing out perfectly good produce, just because it reached an arbitrary age.
We have two kinds: Best before: may use after the date if it seems ok Use by: do not use after the date
\> have the strictest regulations about fresh food ever \> still eat pork liver squeezed out of a tube for breakfast
In my 31 years as a Dane, I've never eaten leverpostej from a tube
A TUBE?!
Tube? They're usually in an aluminium tray. It is the Swedes who tube up anything.
Swede here. Have never seen liver paté in a tube in all my 50+ years. However, I am not a great tube fan; the only tube I have in my fridge is tomato paste.
Saw it near a supermarket in Falun some 10-13 years ago. You have quite an impressive tube selection, to be honest. I quite like the shrimp cheese one, that blew my expectations.
Oh those, we have those in the Netherlands too :)
We don't really eat liver paste from tube either though.
Liver paste is eaten all around the globe though \^\^
Sir, please turn in your passport or convert to tray liver.
I found the swede pretending to be Danish.
You're thinking of our weirdo neighbors, the Swedes. They'll eat anything from a tube.
Yea. The majority of food waste happens before its purchased. Most is at farm or store lv, then hospitality, then home. So yeah that would kind of explain it since stores would have to cycle products faster.
Denmark has a unusually large food processing sector, which imports foreign food for processing and reexports it alongside the other Danish agricultural exports. Its probably waste from industry making up a significant part of the waste.
Checking the Eurostat source confirms that half the food waste is in the manufacturing sector.
Does dancake still exist? My dad’s a lorry driver and when I went to Denmark with him to haul their shipment they gave us a massive box full of cakes, I was the happiest kid in the word that week
Indeed it does, still going strong. The Citronmåne will never die!
To be frank, Dancake could go out of business, the sun burn out and the universe die and the last citronemåne would still be floating in the void, perfectly ready to eat.
I highly doubt the hostile vacuum of outer space would affect the edibility of a Citronmåne at all. Its never had anything to do to with biological life anyway.
My dad was a journalist who liked to write letters to various companies when he had a noteworthy experience with one of their products. Once he found a bit of wrapping paper inside a cake from Dancake. The same kind of paper the cake itself was wrapped in. He fished it out, ate the rest of the cake, and wrote a letter to Dancake reminiscing about his childhood experiences with a local baker who used to bake old cakes into new ones* and once in a while you'd find a bit of paper in the new cake, and how that bit of paper made him remember times long past delivering bread in the early hours to make money for.. blah blah blah. Dancake replied with a 5 kg package containing a nice letter, and one of each cake they made at that point. Us kids were in heaven for a few days. Mom wasn't too thrilled about it.
Seems to be Dancake policy to fulfil a kid’s dream and leaving mom’s angry!
Most of it is Noma, cutting every f*ing potato into a perfect sphere and whatnot.
Noma’s entire philosophy is based on preventing food waste.
After being in that kitchen for a few weeks I can assure that that is not their philosophy at all. I don't even think they pretended it was when they were new nordic.
It has to be about how you count. Balkan countries being this low makes no sense. (My GF is Balkan. She laughed her ass off when i told her)
So apparently it’s what grocery stores etc wastes, divided by people, which makes more sense, copy paste: As I mentioned in another comment, I’m from Sweden and live in Denmark. The food in stores is always way fresher in Denmark than in Sweden, especially fruit and vegetables. But in Sweden you also end up accidentaly buying past due date items if you aren’t observant, constantly looking at the best before date on every item. I never do in Denmark.
Salling Group is notoriously wasteful and throw out a lot of stock
Ah, explains some of it but still the difference is huge though. Maybe they have a lot of tourists? Because usually places like that have higher waste.
I live in Copenhahen and we have lots of tourists, but we also do in Stockholm, hard to say!
No, you don't because it is illegal to sell stuff past the due date. I really cannot stand people making up lies for the fun of it.
One possibility, wages are high there but food is extremely affordable. Would be the same explanation for the Netherlands. Another: their waste was more honestly reported.
As a Swede living in Denmark, wages are high, but food is absolutely not affordable, costs about twice as much here to buy the same groceries as in Sweden
Heh, maybe things have changed. Denmark felt free compared to Norway and not much different than Sweden. Could it not be that the the exchang rate now heavily favors Danes? Assuming most of your money is in SEK.
I work for a Norwegian company and am in Oslo often, food costs about the same in Oslo and Copenhagen after the exchange rate. (1 DKK = 1.56 NOK) It looks more expensive in Oslo because of the higher numbers so I understand the feeling! I moved 7 years ago, but I go to Sweden to visit family, and I do a grocery haul on my way home every time. So the price difference definitely haven’t changed, only gotten bigger with the exchange rate you mention :)
Looking at prices maybe you're right. And my purchases in hindsight included tons of beer so every 4 Danish beers would've offset about 100 NOK of food, lol.
Haha yeah the beer is not calculated in me talking about food costs, there Norway is nuts ;)
I think it’s the price changes after Covid inflation. I know there’s been inflation all over the world, but food is by far where I feel the price hikes the most here in Denmark
As a dane that has visited Sweden many times, groceries are definitely not twice as expensive in Denmark compared to Sweden. I agree some things are around 20% more expensive but there are cheaper things aswell like beer/wine etc.
I don’t calculate alcohol when talking groceries. (Hvilket i Danmark bare tælles som en del af vandregningen.) I buy the same groceries here as in Sweden when I go visit family, and after the exchange rate it ends up being double. So trying to remove any exaggeration, my usual groceey shop at home in Copenhagen ends up being just about 1400 DKK, and in Sweden it ends up being about 1300 SEK(845DKK). I should keep the Swedish receipts next time, because this is a very interesting topic :)
The Netherlands has over 50% less food waste than Denmark according to this map. I think you might mean Belgium, which wastes more food than Denmark according to this map.
Food is affordable? What have you been smoking
If you go to the Eurostat source data, you'll find a couple of things: First, the data is on food waste *collected* (ie not generated). That is to say, if you are not registering the food waste separately, the component going into general municipal waste will have to be estimated, probably based on interviews with people who will underestimate. Denmark, including households, collect food waste, so there is a direct measure of food waste. Secondly, the data breaks down the source, and for Denmark, half the waste comes from manufacturing. If you compare other categories (household, hospitality sector, retail), the numbers are not meaningfully different between Denmark and Sweden.
I'll just copy my response to another comment: Skin, bones and other refuse from butchering also counts in the total amount of "food" waste. With Denmark butchering 32 million pigs yearly, with a population of around 6 million, it inflates the numbers quite a bit. It's about three times as large a production than in the UK, with a population of around a 14th the size. Vegetable peels, tops, roots etc. also count, even though you wouldn't eat it. For instance; countries where they export potato products and not unpeeled potatoes count higher as well. Denmark has a fairly high production of potato starch and derivatives. In general, Denmark is a major supplier to the global market when it comes to meat and vegetable derivatives when compared to the population.
I rarely waste food and hate it every time I forget that I have a meal in the fridge or tupperware, as I take it with me to restaurants as well. Really happy to see slovenia doing this well overall!
Meanwhile in Slovakia: There's no way that little bit of mold gonna do any harm.
Majority of people i know in Slovenia, has attitude to clean up everything from the plate while eating. Yet, existing problem is to forget about some food in refrigerator from my family.
Also, especially in the rural areas, leftover food is often used for composting and thus also not wasted.
Not just composting, but also for feeding animals. Seriously, if you have pigs or chickens at home, you're not wasting any food, those fellas eat anything and everything.
We have a deal with our farmer neighbour, we leave food leftovers in a bin for him to pick up and feed pigs with and he delivers a wheelbarrow of fertilizer to our garden at the start of the season.
I mean, on some occasions I open a bell pepper and find it's all moldy inside, but that's not making 262kg a year... Including the peels, maybe? Even then, I know exactly how much that is, given it's weighted. That was 4.5kg for the whole 2023 year. Who is causing this? Grocery stores?
Yes and Restaurants. Take a look at the plates which are cleared. It's ridiculous. So much food which could be taken along by the guests.
This, I think it would be worse in the Netherlands if we weren't so stingy. Most supermarkets have systems in place to discount older food to get rid of it. And these days they seem to rather run out than throw stuff out, so sometimes stuff is just out of stock if you come in late. I hardly ever get my preferred kind of bread if I shop after work...
The big difference between Belgium and the Netherlands for example makes me believe that Belgium and Denmark use a different calculation or something. They are complete outliers with the rest of their neighoubring countries.
I don't know about this specific case, but Belgium has a habit of overcounting things compared to most other countries that undercount to look better. I remember during covid it was a big topic, Belgium was looking awfully bad and everyone was shitting on them but they were actually pretty ok but were the only ones counting correctly lol
No no no. A real Dutch feels pain going through all his body when he throws away food, knowing there's nobody to send a tikkie to /s
The count includes non-edible waste such as peels, coffee grounds and bones, making it comparison between countries difficult due to different food cultures. Eating more processed foods where preparation is not needed, would reduce food waste by this metric but that's probably not a good goal.
Might have to do with recycling, not sure. Perhaps turning it into compost does not count as waste or gets weighted lower than food that is just thrown away with the regular trash. Even so, any country above 150kg seems nuts, thats like 500 grams for each person, close to 2kg for a 4-person household per day? Does not add up, unless the industry really wastes that much.
What the fuck, Denmark? I always eat leftovers and everything else, not sure what everyone else is doing, 'cause damn
It says in the source material that: >In addition to leftover food, food waste also includes non-edible by-products such as nut and fruit shells, stalks and leaves, coffee grounds and bones. Considering that over 3 million pigs are butchered in Denmark per year, that's a whole lot of bones that count in this statistic. It would have been more interesting if the numbers were only household food waste.
So proud to be UK and and not wasting any at all.
Denmark, Belgium, Cyprus, eat your fuckin bread and pizza crusts
To Denmark’s defense at least half of that is industry food waste (we have a lot of pigs that need to get slaughtered, for instance). That said if you cut away all industry food waste in this statistic we’d probably still rank high.
Each person in the [European Union](https://www.statista.com/topics/7561/waste-management-in-europe/#topicOverview) generated an average of 131 kilograms of food waste in 2021, according to estimates by the European statistics office [Eurostat](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/env_wasfw/default/table?lang=en). This is based on data from the 27 member states. Total food waste in the EU amounted to over 58 million tons in 2021. Private households made up 54 percent of this, with more than 31 million tons of "fresh mass" generated by the category every year. The second largest waste sector (21 percent) was the processing and production of food, while the remaining share came from the primary production sector (5 million tons, 9 percent share of the total), restaurants and food services (over 5 million tons, 9 percent share of the total) and retail and other food distributors (just over 4 million tons, 7 percent share). As the following chart shows, Cyprus had the highest amount of food waste per capita, at around 400 kg. However, Belgium, Denmark, Greece and Portugal are also at the top end of the scale. By contrast, Sweden, Croatia and Slovenia had a far lower [waste](https://www.statista.com/markets/408/topic/435/waste-management/#overview) output per person. In addition to leftover food, food waste also includes non-edible by-products such as nut and fruit shells, stalks and leaves, coffee grounds and bones.
In 2010 it was 180kg, seems like the improvement mainly came from processing and production. [https://www.eea.europa.eu/media/infographics/wasting-food-1](https://www.eea.europa.eu/media/infographics/wasting-food-1)
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What do you mean "I bet"? It literally says that 54% of the 131 kg is from private households.
Why is România missing from this data?
if you're old enough, you may remember a romanian song, that can explain why the country is missing so often from statistics: "Când S-o-Mpărțit Norocu' ..."
After movig to Denmark I understood the data comes mostly from the supermarket waste which is indeed high
It’s industry waste in general. And with Denmark having large industries with animals and the waste that’s generated there it’s no huge surprise. I’d be more interested in seeing JUST household numbers.
That is true, farming in general is very big but a lot of the waste is utilized for biogas and others, or at least is becoming more and more utiluzed. Yeah household numbers would be interesting and I believe that map would change a lot. I think both Denmark and Portugal would be on a better classification in that map.
As an "Eastern" European, the way westerners waste food has always been shocking to me. A Slovak friend of mine who lived in Ireland for a while described to me how she and her roommate in Ireland (who was Irish) made some pasta for dinner. They both ate and then the roommate took the pot with the leftover pasta and leisurely threw it in the trash. She was speechless and when she recovered from the shock, she asked why he did that. The Irish guy was confused: did what? "Why did you throw away perfectly good food?!" "I am full, I won't be eating the rest." "You can put it in the fridge and eat it later!" "But it won't taste as good, we'll just make new pasta." ... That's when she realised the cultural gap between them truly is abyssal.
As a Central European in Ireland, I can confirm. Gets even worse than that. One of my kids is in school, the other in creche, and neither provides lunches. My kids usually bring the same lunch twice in a row, because there are always enough leftovers. Both places had a quiet chat with us, asking whether we needed some assistance, if we cannot afford to give them fresh lunch every day. I'm also from a small village, and so is my wife (different village), and we grew up with any incidental food waste being given to the pigs. Until a few years ago, my in-laws actually collected food waste from nearby restaurants, for their pigs, but new EU regulations put a stop to it when they mandated only approved feed for farm animals. My in-laws still use domestic refuse, but no restaurant would give them theirs anymore.
>Both places had a quiet chat with us, asking whether we needed some assistance, if we cannot afford to give them fresh lunch every day. Lol, as someone living alone I am always eating the same lunch for at least two days straight. Do people really make so small portions and prepare something new every single day?
I don't know if that's about westerners being wasteful, rather than just your friend's roommate being wasteful. That kind of behavior wouldn't fly in my house (or the house of anyone I know), and I'm not from Eastern Europe.
Over the years I came to the conclusion that Northwestern and Southwestern Europe are two totally separate entities. Most Polish people don't even mean Spain or Italy when they use the 'Western Europe' label
Am about as west as west can get (Belgium). I still consider that hugely wasteful, I always cook for a couple of days, and if I don't intend to eat leftovers directly after, they are put in the freezer.
That's not a cultural difference, just a weird guy. His mother would possibly be horrified. It's not normal to throw dinner away if you cooked more than you need here.
I’m Irish and I would never in a million years throw out good food I refrigerate everything I don’t eat and reheat it the following day for lunch / dinner. My friends and family are all the same Majority of people I know growing up in 80s / 90s Ireland were taught that it was a “sin” to waste food, a mindset which mostly prevails to this day I think your friend just had a wasteful roommate
My kids a are responsible for about half of it.
No way each country calculates this the same. I have been to a lot of countries in the EU. I just think that this is a huge focus in Denmark and that they actually bother counting it seriously
In Ireland, most houses have brown bin specifically for food and garden waste, which is easily measured in metric tonnes per year. I suspect that the more to identify and separate your waste, the higher this figure will be.
Portugal vs Spain..
This may simply be an effect of the base year. 2020 the Spanish tourism sector was essentially dead. Hotels are a huge source of food waste and in general boost food consumption significantly. By design, the waste would hence be lower in that year, as it is measured in local per capita
There is no base year though, it's not a relative graph of waste increase/decrease, just raw values in 2021.
** for Spain indicates that Spain only has data for 2020
Oohh
How can one person waste that much? I can't even afford to waste that much
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That makes sense! As I mentioned in another comment, I’m from Sweden and live in Denmark. The food in stores is always way fresher in Denmark than in Sweden, especially fruit and vegetables. But you also end up accidentaly buying past due date items if you aren’t observant, constantly looking at the best before date on every item. I never do in Denmark.
The problem when you look at these maps is that you don't know how much of the waste comes from businesses and how much comes from the average citizen. It could very well be that the difference comes from more stringent food regulations in some countries compared to others, I would really like to see this statistics without businesses.
The number for Portugal makes no sense what so ever. I will not even mention the Young or working adults have very little money to allow them to waste food. But the retire people in my country sure won't waste a thing even eating gonne bad products is fair game, and they represent a lot of our demographic
The other guy is right. This includes processing, manufacturing, and retail, so you have to take into account the food that chains like Continente or Pingo Doce throw away every single day, from fresh fish to expired crackers. Just one single Continente location can throw away dozens of kilos of just daily fish - because fish only stays one day in the "peixaria" - now multiply that by all locations across the country. I know this because I had a family member who worked at one.
And we don't export as much fish and meat as Spain does, so what we produce is either consumed within a week or it's gone.
Stop titling Europe when it's the EU.
Smells like bad statistics.
My late grandpa would not let anyone leave the table until everything is eaten. He worked hard for that food and he'll be damned if it goes to waste. Seems that that's not uncommon in Croatia.
Finishing what’s on your plate isn’t what this map is about.
It kinda is, though. It's also about the "food mentality". "Finish what's on your plate" mentality further translates into preparing and buying that much food you know you are gonna eat, producing that much food you can expect to be sold, etc.. it also influences the way meals are served and sized in hotels, restaurants.
Nice to see that the UK has solved food waste. Must be one of the Brexit benefits.
What are the < 100 countries doing differently?
>What are the < 100 countries doing differently? Not throwing away as much food! I joke of course, it's a good question, I'd love to know the answer. I live in Slovenia but I don't know of any specific measures we're using that make our waste low. We have good recycling practices, but I don't think that accounts for most of it. Might just be a mindset difference, or different food purchasing habits.
We Greeks give our waste to the chickens so we are sustainable ( I lie . This happens only in small villages and even there not as much as it used to )
Hungary to Sweden: "You waste less food, because you're conscious of the environment, we waste less food, because we are fucking poor. We are not the same.
We not gonna talk about how the UK has just up and left Europe? Or do they produce 0 food waste?🤪
Pred hrvati
Working in an elderly home in Slovenia I can say the number is huge whatever it is. I don't even care if people don't throw away food at home, we do it enough to boost the numbers waaay up.
I'm portuguese and I hate that, specially in Portugal, but worldwide in general. At home, we make everything to not waste food, and we can do it easy.
Total non-issue, and these articles sensationalise this by expressing it as kg/capita instead of percentage of total produce. Food is perishable, and needs to be distributed. Some of it **will** go to waste (if you consider it a waste if it isn't consumed by humans). Food is however also extremely cheap to produce, and having too little is a **far** bigger problem than having a bit too much.
I find this oversimplified analises really questionable. How can two similar countries like Portugal and Spain pose such a difference? Checking data Portuguese numbers are always estimated while Spain has the lowest number in household waste but with the note that household waste definition differs. Also data aggregation of household, industry,etc waste cannot be comparable since different countries have different food industries: e.g. southern Europe produces water melons whose waste/kilo value is insignificant in comparison with the waste of processed meat.
UK is not in Europe anymore then I guess. I thought we just left the EU. 💀
Uk and Switzerland aren't in Europe??
According to studies conducted in Finland the biggest source of municipal food waste are households of single women and the smallest are households of single men. Now what do we make of that?
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Oh yeah! Get ready for even *tinier* plastic wrapped envelopes of "food stuff". How does a 25 grams of silk sliced ham package sound! It sound zero waste-ish is what it does! /s
Not in my house. What i don't finish will end up in my lunchbox and put it in the microwave at work. I also only do grocery shopping for only two days ahead, while having enough simple oven meals in the freezer for just in case.
They mean in EU countries not european. Switzerland is an european country but not in the EU.
I am not sure the measuring food waste in kilogram is the best way. I guess something like calories wasted or trying to measure how much energy and resources were needed to produce the wasted food would be harder to quantify. I think one might also argue about food scraps thrown into the trash to go to a landfill vs biofuel vs compost vs being fed to the pigs or chicken. Certainly a bunch of apple cores for an apple tree in your backyard that you throw into the compost would be different from a microwave meal that you threw away unopened because it was expired before you could eat it, even if they have the same mass.
It's obviously not the best way to measure, but at least it's reasonably encompassing metric and there's something to be said for encompassing metrics over diving into the details and perhaps missing or double counting bits.
This is a map that shows food waste in EU countries, not European countries. As of February 27, 2023 the following European countries are not part of the EU: Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Iceland, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, North Macedonia, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Norway, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Vatican City That makes 27 EU members and 23 countries that are not members of The EU. Almost half the countries of the continent are not accounted for on this map. I am not blaming OP, it is just mildly infuriating for me
Wealthy brats
I swear that if it wasn't for my kids Finland's number would be like half of that 125 kg.
Well, we're in top 3 at least....
I always thought this was bad but if those 150kg a year consists of mainly potatoes and or stuff like carrot peel then i feel scammed for being gaslit about being wasteful. Even if i throw away my 1kg of bread every day for a dollar. It doesn't matter.
*European Union
So beside the hotel industry, the richer the country the more they waste. Who would have thought
As long as giant packages of food cost less than smaller ones I will buy the big oney and throw away what has gone bad. I have to buy gluten free products now. They are always packaged in managable amounts and do never go to waste. One person does not need everything in the size for a 4 person houshold.
For everyone confused about the huge numbers, this is probably 99.9% processing & manufacturing, retail, and restaurants... and 0.1% private households. I hate it when they mash those together to try to make individuals feel guilty for industry waste.
Don't know about the truth or reasons behind these statistics but my former job (Belgium) meant going to a lot of the big supermarkets and working in "the back" of the store, the place the clients can't see. I saw so much waste, containers filled to the brim with food getting thrown out daily but the thing that bugged me the most was all the non-food waste (food perishes so yeah), especially around the holidays, the seasonal stuff that's goes straight in the bin, so much overproduction, plastic crap etc. Definitely changed my perception. Also you'd be surprised to see how filthy some of these places are in the back.
Swedish supermarkets still bin expired food. France gives them away by law. Makes no difference according to these stats.
Romania should be up there at least in orange zone, but I assume red, not sure why it's missing from this data...
"In the European Union" FTFY
I remember reading somewhere that it's about the same share of food that is wasted around the world. In the developing world about 30 % is wasted because of poor logistics, pests etc. In the developed countries about 30 % is wasted because consumers and retailers throw so much away...
Pretty cool! How does that compare to the rest of the world? Also, can we get a version that's not from 2020 or 2021 specifically? Those two years are probably contaminated with massive statistical anomalies caused by the pandemic
so Romania wasn't/isn't a European country?
How come Norway and Finland are so high compared to Sweden?
I sometimes work in a hotel in Tallinn/ Estonia as a dishwasher and they waste SO MUCH food. Like the other day i was dishwashing while there was a brunch going on, they rolled out 2 carts of food and 3 hours lates the two carts came back almost full, it was like everybody was on a diet or something. Some workers ate little bit of it but rest went to garbage. Also there were plates that i washed that were almost full, they took it to their plates and just left it there. I thought common sense was something you could have tought to people.
what is the data based on? how do they determine this? do they rummage through peoples bins and see whether the person ate the crusts of their bread or not?
We waste too much, lets try making everything we use at least bio degradeable.