TOWARDS A NEW ZERO FOOD WASTE MINDSET BASED ON HOLISTIC ASSESSMENT

Food waste is a major problem: around 88 million tonnes of food is wasted annually along the EU supply chain, from primary production to consumption, with associated costs of €143 billion. The associated environmental impact is also huge: global food loss and waste is equivalent to 8-10% of total anthropogenic GHG emissions and costs around $1 trillion per year, and 30% of agricultural land is wasted. The situation may be even worse, as statistics indicate that 70% of all food lost or wasted by humans may be unrecorded because it originates from primary production or is used as animal feed. In parallel, the assessment of this problem remains unresolved, not only because it is extremely complex due to the lack of open access data and the absence of a standard methodology for comprehensive assessment in real food systems, but also because it affects the commitment of private entities that need to assess the cost-effectiveness and sustainability of food waste prevention and reduction (FWPR) solutions in order to act. ToNoWaste is a 48-month project in which 21 institutions from 7 countries collaborate to overcome this challenge with a multi-stakeholder and interdisciplinary approach that considers not only agronomic, economic, environmental and business model challenges, but also other cross-cutting aspects such as psychology, law and social innovation to fight also against gender and social inequalities. ToNoWaste will inspire market actors to use science and evidence-based assessment tools and data to make better decisions towards more sustainable food production and consumption patterns. It starts from research on what makes the best decision regarding FWPR actions in the fresh food value chain. It is an open innovation ecosystem designed to leverage previous findings for the identification of social, technical/environmental, economic, political/legal, ethical and demographic drivers and to collaborate with ongoing R&D actions to propose comprehensive FWPR solutions.