Food waste in ch: 330kg/y per household

Coffee
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As per title:

Apparently we waste 330kg of food per year. Some household there is probably wasting 630kg, because I’m sure I don’t waste more than 30kg per year (and that is an upper limit imho).
If I waste 30kg of food, I can classify it like this, with very shitty estimates (just to start the topic):

  • 200g of bones per month. probably less on average? Maybe more in the summer
  • 200g of roots and other parts of vegetables that you don’t eat, like a bit of the end of an sparagus, the hard part at the bottom of a salad, onion external layers and so on)
  • 50g of egg shells ( 10 eggs per month maybe)
  • 30g per month of stale bread. This is random. Sometimes happens. I used to bake a cake with it.

Did I miss something? Maybe I can round it up to 1kg per month. I really don’t understand how can a family waste almost 30kg of food per month. One kg a day. I think they might have taken retail food and split with some rules, even if it has its own category.

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You didn’t check the link. the 330kg is only per household. The category “Wholesale and retail trade” wastes less, apparently. I don’t believe it.

It’s not that it’s nonsense, it’s that it is not correctly presented. If you see that there are 100 tonnes of meat that is wasted every year, you can start producing less meat, for example. This is of course not on the household waste list. For household the only thing that makes sense is to learn being less picky and maybe learn to eat what you have instead of that feeling I-dont-feel-like-eating-asparagus-again-this-month attitude that some people has (or I suppose they have…)

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I understand but this reminds me what i’ve read about subventioning electric cars. They said it was a tax on the poor for the rich, since EV are (were?) mostly bought by rich people. Of course also rich people pays taxes, but the idea make a bit of sense.

If suddenly meat is more expensive, “poor” people will complain because only “rich” can eat it. If instead we check all how much meat we need and produce only that more or less, no one should theoretically complain. In practice, meat will cost more :smiley:

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For “personal” waste thrown away “at home” shouldn’t you only be looking at this - “Households - 778,000t” so about 100kg per person in CH p.a.?
I mean if you want to compare it to that 30kg of bones and eggshells etc. that you throw away p.a. @ma0 .

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I got that 330kg and I compare to my 30kg p.a. as household of 2. I should have written 45kg to be more fair probably.
The 330kg is taken from that 778000t. The article says 330kg somewhere.

I made a mistake I think, but I thought that 778000t / 7mil * 3 = 330kg.
But the article talk about 2.8mil T = 330kg per person. ops ahah.

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I worked in a restaurant where we did a food compost for our plants plus a no waste stock with all the veggies and shells, maybe could be an idea

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Also to mention is, that they differentiate between avoidable and unavoidable, where the latter is - "Unavoidable food losses are, for example, parts of food that are not edible or are considered inedible in our culture."
The 100kg per person p.a. household waste is only “avoidable” waste acc. to the table titles.

Your bones, onion outsides, salad stem and eggshells are unavoidable (in our culture), and not part of the avoidable waste.
Your only avoidable waste would be the stale bread, so with 30 or 45kg of household waste you have massively overestimated your avoidable waste IMO.

Frugal people will have similar minimal waste amounts. I think it’s “easy” to reduce avoidable waste to almost zero, with the right mentality. I think it’s still admirable for the people that do, but it’s not thaaat difficult.

But I can clearly see who drives the averages upwards, and how, some examples:

  • I sometimes housesit/water plants when people are away on vacation. People’s fridges are fully stocked with perishable goods as if they forgot they were going away (poor planning, mentality to fulfil every whim regardless of going away soon). These goods will all land in the rubbish when they come back.
  • no feeling for meaning of best before dates
  • no feeling for mould or similar, like throw away 200g of cheese because there is one spot of mould
  • no interest for preparing/eating leftovers
  • another driver is perishable convenience food like “pre-washed prepared salad”, this will go off within 2 days, while a unprepared salad easily keeps for a week.

All-in-all food has become too cheap in CH, or more significantly it has become a too small part of the monthly budget (on average around 5% of income, or up to 10% of fixed expenses) to think about the value lost by wasting it “just for fun”.

Our grandparents certainly wasted much much less.

Unfortunately supermarkets and their marketing will never fight the waste, since more waste = more revenue.
On the contrary they always come up with new concepts which are usually pretty and convenient, but wasteful.

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This is insane, I’d like to meet a person that throws away 270g (or much more since this is avg; and apparently only “avoidable”) of food (or remnants thereof) per day. :rofl:

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It could be though… I know people that always try new recipies straight from some random Youtube video, and then end up throwing half of that away because it didn’t taste good.