Relation food waste and packaging: More postulates than data

30 October 2017

Data on packaged food waste are scarce, but postulates are not. That conclusion can be drawn from the State of Oregon Food product Environmental Footprint Literature Summary Packaging and Wasted Food, published September 2017. Quotes from then report illustrate this: “Food waste rates at the household level are (…) difficult to gather and (…) virtually no empirical data at (…) product level are available”. And: “It is reasonable to assume that increasing shelf life decreases the likelihood that food will be wasted”.
Calculating the environmental packaging versus food ratio does not help as this does not prove a causal effect of the packaging on the prevention of packaged food waste.
Click here for the report (1.34 MB).
Click here for more information about the 1st international conference - Fighting food waste together: how to open the potential of better packaging (22 March during the trade fair Anuga FoodTec 2018 in Cologne, Germany).

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