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Plan to halve Australia’s $20b food waste

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Australia wastes $20 billion worth of food each year but plans have been revealed to reduce the scraps by half.

Federal environment minister Josh Frydenberg has announced $1.37 million for Food Innovation Australia, an agency focused on reducing food waste by getting industry and business to commit to the target by 2030.

“Twenty per cent of everything we consume, we waste,” Frydenberg told reporters at a National Food Waste Summit in Melbourne on Monday.

“This costs the Australian economy about $20 billion a year and about four million tonnes of food ends up in landfill.”

That waste produces more than 700 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, the minister added.

“If food waste was a country, when it comes to producing carbon dioxide emissions, it would be the third-biggest in the world behind China and the United States,” he said

The government will develop a food waste baseline to keep the plan on track,  Frydenberg said.

Food Innovation Australia will finalise by late 2018 its plan to halve waste, with the voluntary commitment program for businesses and industry to begin in early 2019.

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