Nearly nine years have passed since the target of halving food waste by 2030 was adopted in Agenda 2030. Despite good intentions and initiatives, the reduction in food waste has fallen far short of this goal. It is time to act; if the goal is to be achieved, efforts must be scaled up with considerably more powerful measures.
Reduced food waste leads to less environmental impact (food waste is estimated to account for about 10% of human climate impact), less resource extraction, and socio-economic benefits. Food waste also leads to social injustice, as fewer people can eat their fill. Moreover, since work on food waste began, our world has become more unstable with accelerating climate change and wars. There is every reason to include the food waste issue in efforts to ensure good preparedness if food and other necessary goods for food production cannot be imported. Efficient food flows without waste contribute to better-prepared countries.
The purpose of this report was formulated in the assignment as follows:
The purpose of this report is to provide policy recommendations for the Nordic countries to further action in each country and regionally. The report should also serve as a handbook for officials in the Nordic countries to access results and lessons learned from each country.
The report is structured as follows: Chapter 3 describes some fundamental and guiding principles based on the hierarchy of waste that the work focuses on. Chapter 4 describes general causes of food waste and emphasises the need to understand the complexity of why food is thrown away so as to design sufficiently effective measures. Chapter 5 discusses the difficult art of measurement and evaluation. Are we really measuring the right things? Chapter 6 provides suggestions on what legislators, authorities, and public decision-makers can do. Reaching the goal of halving food waste is likely to require some radical measures. The selection of proposals is partly from literature and partly based on the authors’ experiences from twenty years of research. Chapter 7 describes the causes of waste in different parts of the food chain and the measures that various actors can take. Thereafter, a more detailed description of the literature search and interviews is presented in Chapter 8. Chapter 9 provides some summarising views. Appendix 1 presents some worthwhile tips on further reading in studies, reports, and documents for those who wish to deepen their understanding.
As a result of increasing attention on the issue of food waste, there has been much forward thinking and innovation. In the report, we want to highlight this by providing a number of good examples from different sectors and countries to serve as inspiration and demonstrate possibilities.
Our aim has been for the report to be easily accessible and provide a good overview of the complex area that food waste represents. This has meant that we have been restrictive in terms of details, instead referring to other works for deeper understanding. Likewise, to avoid burdening the reader, we have chosen to provide a selection of references in the text where appropriate.
We also sought to include more examples from all Nordic countries. Despite searches of relevant websites complemented by interviews with key persons, however, we were unable to access many of the interesting works conducted in Finland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands due to our lack of knowledge in these languages. Generally, there is sparse documentation of measures written in English in the context of the Nordic region. It would be desirable for English titles and summaries to be published in reports and on websites to enable a better exchange of experiences.
In the report, we consistently refer to food waste as “food loss and waste” (FLW) due to the lack of an unambiguous and commonly used definition of what is meant by food waste (see Chapter 5 for a closer description).
Finally, as the report will illustrate, we believe that more attention needs to be paid to what happens in the store. This is where the consumer fills their shopping basket, which in many ways determines how much FLW occurs in households – which is by far the largest in the value chain, has the highest environmental impact, and is the most difficult to influence. What the consumer encounters in the store in terms of price, information, and packaging can play a decisive role in the possibility of reaching the goal of halving FLW. However, before we dig deeper into this, it is appropriate to provide some guiding principles.