Go to content

3. Guiding Principles

There are occasional stories about organisations that have managed to reduce their FLW by astonishing figures. In a deeper look into the measures used to reduced waste, actions such as donations or food being repurposed into new products (e.g. old bread used to make beer) are being described. Naturally, donations and a second life are better than food being thrown away; however, one might ask whether these are the best solutions. They provide rapid statistical reductions for the actors implementing them, but there is a risk that some of the food going to donations is being discarded if it has gone bad,
A Swedish study estimated the food loss of donations to 22%. Sundin N. 2024. Sustainability of food waste prevention through food consumption. PHD thesis, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Uppsala. Sweden. https://pub.epsilon.slu.se/34408/1/sundin-n-20240612.pdf
 and when food is used to produce other food products, losses always occur. Moreover, the food must be transported, which has environmental impacts, especially if it is chilled or frozen. Today, it is also not possible to say how much of the food that is donated or resold is actually being consumed by humans, and there is a significant risk that some FLW is simply moved from one actor to another.
For every planned measure to reduce FLW, one should ask whether there is an even better measure. Generally, the waste hierarchy in Figure 1 should be followed.
V. Pasarín and T. Viinikainen. 2022. Enabling a legal environment for the prevention and reduction of food loss and waste. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/d00567a4-e47e-4814-bca7-75123709bbf2/content (2024-08-14)
pyramid.svg
Figure 1: To reduce environmental impacts as much as possible, solutions should be sought as high up the hierarchy as possible.
According to this, measures should primarily be directed towards reducing waste where it occurs: in agriculture, the food industry, shops, and so on. For example, when there are problems with surplus bread in a shop, one should first look for measures that can reduce the surplus. The remaining surplus can, as the next best alternative, be donated, which is an important social contribution.
F. Galli, A. Cavicchi, and G. Brunori. 2019. Food waste reduction and food poverty alleviation: a system dynamics conceptual model. Agriculture and Human Values, Vol. 36: 289–300. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-019-09919-0
 If the food cannot be donated without significant amounts being discarded, the bread can be used as raw material for new products for human consumption, such as beer (Sweden
Crumbs Beer. https://www.crumbs.beer/home-english/ (2024-06-10).
), flour from crumbs (Norway
), and pasta (Denmark
The Local. 2021. Denmark to repurpose unsold bread as pasta. https://www.thelocal.dk/20210917/denmark-to-repurpose-unsold-bread-as-pasta (2024-06-10).
). However, there is a need for transport for both donations and raw material conversion, increasing the risk of waste and nutrient loss. Only after this will it be appropriate to use the bread as animal feed. Large amounts of bread are turned into animal feed today, which means that it is not classified as waste. Nevertheless, it is still a waste of food. Statistically, food that becomes animal feed is not always reported as waste, even if it was initially produced for human consumption.
As a last resort, the food should go towards energy production in the form of biogas or biofuel. For example, ethanol is produced from bread residues in Finland.
Bioenergy International. 2018. Finnish Breadcrumbs to become Swedish ethanol. https://bioenergyinternational.com/finnish-breadcrumbs-to-become-swedish-ethanol/ (2024-06-10).
 There should be waste management of food that cannot be consumed in any form by humans and animals so that the nutrients in the food can be returned to agricultural land. In biogas production, energy can be extracted, and digestate is formed, which is well suited to improving soil quality in fields, provided they have not been contaminated.
From a political standpoint, it is important to keep track of this hierarchy when considering measures. Above all, it is important that economic and legal policy instruments do not counteract the hierarchy so that it does not, for example, become economically more advantageous to provide food for biogas production than for donations or animal feed.
Finally, one should note that FLW should not only be counted in tonnes. One kilogram of meat can cause 300 times more climate impact than one kilogram of onions. This means that the climate impact is further reduced if meat waste can be reduced by 1 gram compared to if onion waste is reduced by 250 grams.
Similarly, it is more important to reduce waste in later parts of the value chain because of the cumulative environmental impact. When frozen pizza lands on the plate, it would have undergone a long and environmentally impactful journey involving processing and preparation in a factory; it would have been frozen and transported in freezer trucks and freezer displays; it would have been transported home and ended up in yet another freezer before the final energy-demanding preparation in the oven. The total environmental impact of an uneaten piece of pizza is, of course, infinitely greater than if the raw materials had been discarded earlier in the value chain. This underscores the importance of prioritising measures that reduce waste among consumers and in households and various types of restaurants.
Nordic Council of Ministers I www.norden.org/publications I pub@norden.org