The French app Too Good Too Go, specialising in recycling unsold food, has calculated that each French person throws away an average of 25 kilos of food that is still edible every year, according to data published on Monday.
This represents "one meal a week per person", or around €157 a year, Meleyne Rabot, the company's new managing director, told French news agency AFP.
Too Good To Go estimates that each French person is responsible for the unnecessary use of 1.3 square kilometres of farmland and 390 litres of water, "more than two bathtubs of water every week".
In addition, more than a kilo of CO2 equivalent is emitted unnecessarily.
The company, which enables retailers to offer their unsold produce at reduced prices based its calculation on Eurostat data from the French ministry of ecological transition. According to them, 1.7 million tonnes of edible waste were thrown away by French households in 2021.
The latest data shows that 39 percent of food waste occurs at consumer level, compared with 22 percent at primary production level, i.e. on farms.
Prevention
14 percent occurs at the agro-industrial processing level, 12 percent at distribution level and 13 percent at consumption outside the home, in canteens or restaurants.
That means a total of 4.3 million tonnes is thrown away along the entire food chain, according to the SDES, the Ministry's statistics department.
Edible waste accounts for just under half of the overall food waste in France which accounts for 8.8 million tonnes, including bones and peelings.
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With 129 kilogrammes per inhabitant of food waste globally each year, France is just below the European average of 131 kilogrammes per inhabitant, SDES said in April.
Too Good To Go, which was set up in 2016, claims to have "helped prevent the waste of more than 350 million meals", and says it has "100 million users and 170,000 active partners across 19 countries".
Its communication comes ahead of the UN international day to raise awareness of food loss and waste, on 29 September.
In a bid to reduce landfill, France brought in a compulsory compost rule as of 1 January, 2024. People are now obliged to separate food waste from ordinary waste using compulsory compost bins in their buildings or provided in public parks by their town halls.
(with AFP)
