Albert Vilario Alonso

Specialist in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Reputation and Corporate

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How can we calculate food waste?

Aug 3, 2016

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NOTE: This article was first published in spanish and can be found here.
Goal 2 of the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 proposes "to end
hunger, achieving food security and improving nutrition and sustainable
agriculture".
Although the proportion of undernourished people decreased by almost half in
the past decades and great progress in eradicating extreme hunger has been
made, there is still an estimated 795 million people suffering from
chronic malnutrition in 2014, mainly on the African continent.
Meanwhile, in the developed countries, we can not just say that there is no
extreme hunger but food is wasted in the whole chain from harvest to the final
consumer itself, which means that globally food by value of 750 billion dollars is
lost or wasted every year.
That food is wasted or lost in the different processes of the value chain such as
production, handling and storage, processing, distribution and sale, and finally
consumption. But, as we can see in the chart below, the percentage of lost
food in each of these stages are not the same throughout the planet but
varies very significantly according to geographical location.

Source: Whats Food Loss and Waste Got to Do with Sustainable Development?
A Lot, Actually from Brian Lipinski.

While we might say that in more developed continents food is lost in the hands
of the consumer, in less developed ones it is lost in production processes,
handling and storage. This is because in less developed countries the
techniques in these processes are not efficient, while in the developed countries
consumers are those who waste food for other reasons such as their appearance,
because it is discarded when food has passed an "expiration" date even if it is
perfectly consumable in complete safety for health, because is cooked but not
consumed in its entirety, or simply because it is acquired but ultimately not
consumed.
In Laura Martins article "Wasting Grocery simple because aesthetics!" we
can see more information about waste in those last parts of the value chain.
Ultimately, I think we can say that basically in the first world food is wasted
because we have an easy access to it, and because its low cost, leading
the consumer to believe that "it is not so bad" the fact of wasting food, while less
developed countries would like to enjoy the same food (maybe not in kind but in
quantity and quality) that their inefficient production methods, handling and
storage do not allow them to consume.
Anyway, the fact that in developed countries between 17% and 23% of food is lost
in the production process indicates that there is still enough room for
improvement in these processes.

Impact on natural resources.

Returning to a global vision, according to the report "Food wastage footprint.
Impacts on natural resources of the United Nations Organization for Food
and Agriculture (FAO), global food loss and waste represents about 3.3 gigatons
of emissions of greenhouse gases, and is calculated that if this food was "one
country", it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the

country", it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the

world, surpassed only by China and the United States. With regard to the blue
water footprint (ie, consumption of surface and groundwater resources) of food
waste it is about 250 km3, equivalent to three times the volume of Lake Geneva.
Finally, food produced but not consumed would occupy nearly 1.4 million
hectares of land, which accounts for about 30% of the agricultural area in the
world.
As we can see, such waste has a tremendous impact on the current and
future sustainability of the planet, and the survival of millions of
human beings.

The first protocol for calculating the waste and loss of food.
Regardless of the efforts of countries to minimize this nonsense, very interesting
ideas are proposed from the World Resources Institute (WRI). WRI is a non
profit organization that is dedicated to making global research in more than 50
countries, with over 450 experts and staff working to turn great ideas into action
to preserve natural resources and sustainable economic opportunities and human
welfare. His work focuses on six critical issues at the intersection of environment
and development: climate, energy, food, forests, water and cities and
transportation.
The WRI has promoted the "Food Loss & Waste (FLW) Protocol. This
protocol has been presented at the summit of the Global Green Growth
Forum (3GF) this past june in Copenhagen and represents the first global
standard for measuring food loss and waste.
The purpose of this standard is to "facilitate the quantification of lost and
wasted food (what to measure and how to measure) and improve consistency
and transparency of reported data. The standard allows consistent
quantification of baseline and monitoring progress towards Goal 12.32 of
Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations development and other
objectives".
Version 1.0 of this protocol is divided into three parts. Part I includes an
overview of the purpose and destination of the FLW standard, a definition of
terms and applications, potential targets quantization, steps to guide the
preparation of an audit, a summary of the requirements of the standard and
underlying principles of accounting and reporting. Parts II and III provide more
details about the requirements of the standard and guidance on implementation.
In addition, the 153-page document has its appendices, glossary of terms, etc.
This standard is voluntary and is designed for organizations of all types and
sizes, in all economic sectors, and in any country. It features a modular
approach that allows flexibility to entities that use it. For example, an entity may

choose whether quantifies both food and non-edible parts attached and removed
from the food supply chain, if only quantifies food, or only inedible parts
associated.
Regarding the application of the standard components of the food supply
chain, we can see in the table below that the protocol includes food and nonedible parts associated and drinks, leaving out foods that are transferred from
one part the food supply chain to another but are still used for human
consumption, packaging, and food lost previously to be harvested (or sacrificed if
that is the case).

Before developing a FLW inventory in accordance with this standard, entities

must clearly express why they want to quantify the loss and food waste, because
the reason or purpose for such quantification influences the scope of the
inventory and the degree of precision required. Examples of reasons why
an organization may want to implement the protocol are food security, reduced
economic losses and environmental sustainability.
The protocol is organized according to the steps that an entity must follow
in the development and reporting of an inventory of lost and wasted
food. As shown in the following figure, those steps are: define the objectives,
review the principles of reporting and accounting, establish the scope, decide how
to quantify the loss and food waste, gather and analyze data, calculate inventory
results, assess uncertainty, perform a review, perform inventory report, and
finally setting new goals and control over time.

The principles on which the protocol is based to make accounting and reporting
are similar to other standards, and they are relevance, completeness,
consistency, transparency and accuracy.
The definition of the scope of the inventory is crucial because it has to align
with the objective or objectives that underlie the decision to quantify that the
entity has taken. The scope has to contemplate the time period over which the
inventory results are reported, the materials included in the inventory (food only,
only inedible parts, or both), where will the food go when it is removed from the
food supply chain, and the boundary (food category, stage of life cycle,
geographic, organization) on which it is quantified. We can see the breakdown of
scope in the following graph.

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Beyond this point, the standard delves into the different methods to quantify the
loss and waste of food, and how to collect, calculate and analyze data, how to
identify the causes of such losses and waste, how to revise and assure inventory,
how to perform an inventory report, and finally how to set future goals and
monitor them.

Certainly, I think that we have a tool of great potential and hopefully with its
future development (do not forget that we can say that it has just left "beta
versin) it will become a recognized standard and used the same way as those
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