James Watt School of Engineering

Global Food Loss and Waste Status

Dr Siming You

Food loss and waste is a global problem of significant socio-economic, environmental and energy consequences. Generally, food loss is considered to be the decrease in quantity or quality of food, whereas food waste is discarded food products in the food supply chain (1). To mitigate the influences of the problem, it is critical to develop better e.g., technologies, logstics approaches and consumption habit/behavior to mitigate food loss and waste, while for the food waste that is unavoidable, effort needs to be made to improve the efficiency of its resource recovery and utlisation. Here we tried to gather existing country-specific food loss and waste data and presented them in maps to highlight the issue and contribute to a better understanding of the scale of the problem. You are welcome to get in touch with feedbacks and for continuous improvement of the maps.

The household food waste (food discarded in households) data were obtained from the UNEP report (2). The UNEP report provides a comprehensive database about global household food waste generation. Attempts were made to extract the food loss and waste data from other sources but all not all countries’/regions’ data were available. For the countries whose data were available (5-52), the food loss and waste data were compared with the household food waste data from the UNEP report and an empirical relationship between food loss and waste and household food waste was developed (details are shown below). The food loss and waste data for the countries/regions whose data were not available were estimated by substitute their household food waste data into an empirical relationship as explained below. A list of references where associated data were extracted are listed in the end. 

Note: if you spot any errors or would like to update us about new data, please contact Siming.You@glasgow.ac.uk

Food loss and waste [MT]

Household food waste [MT]

Food loss and waste per capita [kg]

Household food waste per capita [kg]

Empirical relationship between food loss and waste and household waste

As mentioned above, for countries whose food loss and waste data were available, the food loss and waste data were compared with the household food waste data and an empirical relationship between food loss and waste and household food waste was developed. Non-linear least squares regression analysis was carried out to fit a customized exponential function (y=-99.49exp(-0.02615x)+99.49) to the data using the Trust-Region algorithm. The figure below shows the data and curve fitted. It is worth noting that this empirical model has a few limitations. It may be changed with the update of the database. Hence, the use of the model needs to be with care and data extrapolation based on the relationship is not recommended.

 

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