12th National Food Waste Prevention Day

National Food Waste Prevention Day is celebrated on February 5th, this year's theme, #timetoact, underlines the importance of immediate action to combat this phenomenon and achieve United Nations goal 12.3

ISPRA has just published the update on food waste in the new 2025 indicator database. The sad discovery, a dozen years ago, that a third of food is not consumed but wasted, aroused enormous interest from governments, academia and the sector private. Since then, although awareness and efforts have increased, food waste has not decreased. Compared to the first global estimates by FAO in 2011 (1.3 billion tonnes), recent studies that also consider losses in the field report 2.5 billion tonnes, equal to 40% of production (WWF, 2021)

In order to estimate waste in the entire Italian food system (systemic waste) ISPRA includes, in addition to losses in production and consumption chains such as FAO and UNEP, also overfeeding beyond recommended needs and the net loss in livestock farming resulting from input conversion edibles for humans (wheat, soy, corn, etc.). The updated result is that approximately 66% of the food energy produced is wasted. This tells us that three times what is needed on average is produced and is distributed unfairly and wasted. In terms of kcal/person/day there is an increase of 17% between 2015 and 2021. Faced with a population reduction of 2.7%, the country's waste (kcal/day) increases by 14%. The causal trend already identified by ISPRA is confirmed. The growth of industrial efficiencies generates increases in overproduction and supply which then amplify waste and impacts (an effect known scientifically as the Jevons paradox or "bounce").