Food Waste Intelligence

Today, July 29, is Earth Overshoot Day.  It’s a critically important day for everyone interested in advancing food waste reduction and ensuring a sustainable future.

Earth Overshoot Day represents the point in the year where humanity’s demand for ecological resources (our collective ecological footprint) exceeds the Earth’s ability to supply them (biocapacity). The Global Footprint Network maintains the annual calculation of Earth Overshoot which has, unfortunately, been moving steadily forward (i.e. earlier in the calendar) over time. In 1989, for example, Earth Overshoot Day fell on October 11, while this year it is occurring more than two months earlier, the earliest, in fact, it’s ever fallen. That movement – more than two months in just 20 years -- is cause for great concern because it indicates the accelerated rate at which we are taxing our planet’s finite resources. It isn’t sustainable.

In the United States, 30 to 40 percent of all available food is wasted. Food is the nation’s single largest type of waste. Three U.S. federal agencies have announced a coordinated strategy to address the crisis.

Words matter, and just as it’s important to distinguish between terms such as food loss, food waste, and excess food, it’s also important to distinguish between “recovery” and “prevention” -- because the initiatives and impacts are very different.

Eighty state-level, food-waste related bills were introduced in the United States last year, according to research by Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. While tracking is spotty prior to 2017, the clinic believes this represents a strong uptick.

If you had to pay a fee for wasting food, would you cut back on what you throw out? South Korea bet on the answer being a resounding "yes," which is why it is now the country with the world's strictest food waste laws.