Food waste is a major problem: according to Eurostat, around 57 million tonnes of food are wasted annually in the EU along the entire supply chain from primary production to consumption. This causes an estimated cost of 130 billion euros. At the same time, about 36 million EU citizens cannot afford healthy food.
Which initiatives are successful?
A team led by Mahshid Sotoudeh from the Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences is currently researching the global consequences of food waste as part of the EU project ToNoWaste. As a starting point, initiatives in Spain, Austria, Sweden and Greece are being studied. One thing is clear: steps must be taken by all those involved.
The project team therefore organised three workshops on the topic in Austria, the last of which took place on 23 February. Together with more than 40 experts, they discussed possible pilot projects in Austria and how they could be implemented and evaluated.
Developing pilot projects together
The fruitful exchange brought many concrete ideas on how to avoid and reduce food waste, and encouraged more contact between the different stakeholders. Researchers from Graz University of Technology, Johanneum University of Applied Sciences, IFZ and BOKU as well as representatives from the City of Graz, the Chamber of Agriculture, the Green Economy and the Austrian Armed Forces joined the discussion with representatives from supermarkets, caterers, canteen kitchens, logistics companies, AGES, Caritas, GLOBAL2000 and farmers.
Participants looked at where particular challenges in waste reduction arise, how they are interwoven and how food waste can be efficiently counteracted. It became clear that all levels of the value chain are affected and that better planning, networking and communication are needed. In addition, a survey initiated by the project team was further developed and tested with the help of the workshop results. Through this survey, the experts now hope to identify measures to reduce food waste and find out more about the potential of certain starting points.
"The three ToNoWaste workshops between December 2022 and February 2023 have shown that the expertise, commitment and networking activities in Austria support our project goals. I hope that the experts will diligently participate in the survey, which will run until mid-April, in order to jointly define pilot projects against food waste," says Sotoudeh. Especially in times of increasingly scarce resources, there is a need for awareness to consider food as "food" again and not as calculated waste, she adds.