World Environment Day, 2013

June 5th is this year's date for World Environment Day, but the theme Think. Eat. Save is valuable to consider every day.

World Environment Day is a global anti-food waste and food loss campaign. Australia's food waste expert Jon Dee knows all about the problems and solutions to food waste. As Australia's leading expert on food waste, he says that about $8 billion of food is thrown away by Australians every year.

Jon Dee pulled together Australia's first national food waste stats back in 2003 and initiated the 'National Leftovers Day' food waste initiative. Five years ago he launched the FoodWise.com.au food waste website. He co-wrote the Food Donation Tool Kit to show Australian businesses how to donate high quality excess food to food charities.

On June 5th he is launching a new set of online tools at FoodWise.com.au - these tools will help households to better plan their meals to save money and reduce the amount of food going to landfill.

Here are 10 shocking food waste stats that Jon Dee has collated:

Australians throw away 4 million tonnes of food every year. That's enough to fill 450,000 garbage trucks (check out FoodWise.com.au/FoodWaste).
Australians spend $8 billion a year on food that they buy but throw away.
The average Australian household wastes over $1,000 of food every year.
In Australia up to 40% of household bin content is food waste.
The biggest wasters of food in Australia are young consumers (18-24), households with incomes over $100,000 p/a and families with children. 'The National Waste Report' from the Federal Government estimates that 21.5% of business waste in Australia is food.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted every year.
The 1.3 billion tonnes of food that we waste every year is equivalent to what is produced in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.?
At the same time we throw away all this food, 1 in every 7 people in the world go to bed hungry and more than 20,000 children under the age of 5 die daily from hunger.
The FAO estimates that a third of global food production is wasted or lost.

What are YOU going to do to change this?

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