UK the worst offender in Europe’s 22 million tonne food waste problem

The researchers said educating people about how to shop more carefully and plan their consumption would help cut the amount they throw away, lowering food bills and limiting waste’s impact on the environment.

A new study published on Wednesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters found that Europe as a whole wastes 22m tonnes of food a year.

The research found nearly half of Britain’s potatoes are binned, along with 41 per cent of fruit.

Even Romania, the most frugal country studied, wasted the equivalent of an apple per person per day.

Households in Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, by contrast, waste between 40kg and 60kg per person a year.

A large proportion of the food was found to be vegetables, fruit, and cereals, partly due to their short shelf-life.

The study also sought to quantify the associated levels of natural resources used for the production of food that was wasted, in terms of water and nitrogen. The researchers added that an “essential limitation” of previous quantification studies on consumer food waste for Europe is that they “only use one value (total and/or per product/product group), thereby not taking into account the uncertainty and lack of reliable data on food waste statistics”. “In some ways it’s good that this waste is “avoidable”,” says Davy Vanham, a lead author on the paper. And the food industry is quite cautious: “a lot of food is still “good” but it is thrown away when it passes its sell-by date”.

He acknowledged that the research was hampered by the fact that data was only available from six of the 28 EU member states.

Vanham also explained that there were many possible ways of reducing this waste, with education in schools being a top priority, and urged governments to invest more “in measuring waste with greater accuracy”.

Family finances also typically play a role in how much food is wasted.

“We’ve noticed with Romania, and Africa, that there is less food waste as the population tends to have less money”, said Vanham.