News item | 2023-04-20 | 09:15
The Dutch waste less and less food. Households are making the most progress. Since 2015, they throw away 23 percent less food. In 2022, the Dutch wasted an average of 33.4 kg of food per person at home. There are promising initiatives to reduce waste from farm to fork throughout the food chain, but more efforts are needed. About a quarter of all food in the Netherlands is still wasted. At the current rate, the goal of halving food waste by 2030 will not be achieved. Additional measures are required to achieve the target.
Minister Piet Adema of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality (LNV) wrote this to the House of Representatives today. The letter contains new figures on food waste in consumers’ homes (2022) and throughout the food chain (2009-2020), which also includes agriculture, food producers, supermarkets and the hospitality industry. In addition, a study by Wageningen University & Research (WUR) added with advice on additional measures. In any case, the minister wants to explore mandatory monitoring and reporting of food waste for the food sectors. A decision on additional measures to combat waste is expected to follow before the summer.
Minister Piet Adema of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality (LNV): “Good food is our first necessity of life. If we waste our food, we also throw away unnecessary money, water, energy and other raw materials. And of course the appreciation for the craftsmanship of the farmer. Fortunately, we are making great strides forward. People throw away much less food, especially at home. That’s a great achievement. At the same time, I see that we are still not making enough progress throughout the entire chain. We really need to step up our game to halve food waste by 2030, because there is still a lot to be gained from farm to fork.”
Promising initiatives
The ministry is cooperating with it Nutrition Center and the Foundation Together Against Food Waste to prevent waste. A lot of progress has already been made in households, partly through campaigns such as the annual Waste-Free Week in September. In 2022, the Dutch threw away an average of 33.4 kilos of food per person at home. That is 23 percent less than in the reference year 2015. Nevertheless, the downward trend now seems to be stagnating. Therefore, more action is needed from the entire food chain to help the Dutch to waste less food at home.
A number of promising initiatives against food waste have now been taken throughout the food chain. For example, work is being done on a more effective bread chain to prevent return flows. Every day, 700,000 loaves of bread are baked too much. About half is lost in the chain, including supermarkets, where 8 percent of the bread is returned to bakeries and processed into animal feed. Work is also being done on business cases for the large-scale processing of unavoidable residual flows, such as trimmings from potatoes, vegetables and fruit, into animal feed for the circular production of meat, dairy products and eggs.
Total food waste
Nevertheless, there is still much to be gained in combating food waste throughout the entire food chain, from agriculture to the consumer. The new figures from WUR show that, converted to capita, food waste in the entire food chain in 2020 amounted to 97 to 123 kilos per Dutch person. That is a decrease of 5.8 percent to a maximum of 15.8 percent, compared to 2015. Because the data from chain parties is not yet accurate enough and waste is not measured everywhere, bandwidths are used. Nevertheless, the figures indicate that halving total food waste in the Netherlands yields enormous gains. For example, 2.7 million people can eat food that is not wasted for a year and it ensures a reduction in greenhouse gases of two to three megatons.
Additional measures
In addition to continuing the current approach, additional measures are needed to achieve the food waste target, WUR concludes in the study. For example, it is important to better monitor food losses in agriculture. The minister is also exploring whether it is possible to make monitoring and reporting mandatory in the chain. In this way, it is possible to examine more accurately which measures are effective in combating food waste. Together with additional measures, which will be decided later this year, this should ensure that food waste in the Netherlands is halved by 2030, compared to 2015.