Addressing food waste represents a significant opportunity to put in place measures to protect our environment, prevent economic losses, and help relieve food insecurity. The volume of work already underway to address food waste provides a platform to learn, leverage and build on as we work toward halving of Australia’s food waste by 2030. This strategy adopts a circular economy approach that takes into account the food waste hierarchy and seeks to capture food waste as a resource so it is not sent to landfill. The waste hierarchy prioritises waste management practices in favouring food waste avoidance over resource reuse, recycling, reprocessing, and energy recovery, followed by waste disposal. The hierarchy recognises the inherent value of food waste in providing guidance on the most resource efficient and environmentally sound approaches to dealing with waste. So much can be gained from minimising food waste in Australia, including: increased economic opportunities, including employment, through the creation and development of new products, services and markets; reduced costs for businesses in saved resource inputs, reduced waste management and disposal fees, and increased profits through efficiency gains; increasing profits by converting more ingredients that are saved into a saleable product; reduced costs for households by lowering food bills; reduced environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions; improved food security through the effective redistribution of surplus food. Four priority areas have been identified to achieve the strategy goal: policy support, business improvements, market development, and behaviour change. These, and their areas of focus, have been developed following consultation with industry, business, government, academia and the not-for-profit sectors. 1. Policies are supportive of food waste avoidance, reduction and repurposing; 2. Improvement and adoption of technologies, processes and actions to avoid and reduce food waste; 3. Development of markets to support the repurposing of food waste; 4. Practices and attitudes towards avoiding and reducing food waste are adopted and sustained.
Australia · 2017-11-01