One in three households is wasting the equivalent of a shopping bag full of food each week, a new study has found, despite food waste costing Australians more than $2,000 each year.
Nearly half of Australian households (42%) said they are throwing away as much food or more than they did this time last year, the study from climate action group Wrap and Mayonnaise brand Hellmans has shown.
While the majority of households (77%) said they were concerned about the amount their grocery bill had jumped in the past 12 months, one in three (30%) are still throwing away at least one shopping bag of food waste each week.
The most binned items by Australians are vegetables (29%), fruit (22%), leafy greens (24%) and baked goods (21%) according to the Wrap study.
Respondents said the reasons for this vary, with 43% of people saying they didn’t know where to get tips to avoid wasting food, 25% saying they get bored with the same meals and 18% of saying they struggled to cook food before its expiry date.
Claire Kneller, managing director of Wrap Asia-Pacific, said Australians wasted enough food each year to fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground 10 times over.
“Half of that happens at the consumption end of the supply chain, where food is eaten,” Kneller said.
“Households alone throw away between $2,170 and $2,700 worth of food on average, every year,” she said.
“But our latest research shows that when showed how much money they could save by preventing food waste, the majority said they were going to be more resourceful.”
Each year about 7.6m tonnes of food is wasted in Australia between paddock and plate – with up to 25% of all vegetables produced never leaving the farm, often because they are not shaped perfectly enough for supermarket shelves.
In 2017, the Australian government pledged to tackle the issue and halve the country’s food waste by 2030, when it launched the National Food Waste Strategy.
But the issue only increased during the pandemic – with the country’s wasteful food choices skyrocketing to an estimated $10.3bn in both 2020 and 2021, according to Rabobank’s annual Food Waste Report.
Halving Australia’s food waste by 2030 will require “unprecedented action by governments, industry and the community”, Kneller said.
“In particular, we must slash household food waste by 30%.
“Doing this would save Australian consumers $33bn and prevent 12m tonnes of CO2 emissions.”
