Food Waste

Canadians are throwing out more food than they realize – food that they spent money on and could have eaten!

Inevitably, some food waste is unavoidable – this is the food that can’t generally be sold or eaten, such as bones, some vegetable peelings, egg shells, tea bags, and coffee grounds.

Avoidable food waste is the edible food that ends up in the composter, green cone or garbage. Unfortunately, we often waste good food because we might buy too much, cook too much, forget about it or don’t store it correctly.

In 2022, the National Zero Waste Council researched household food waste in Canada, and the results were astonishing:

• 63% of the food Canadians throw away food that could have been eaten.
• For the average Canadian household 140 kilograms of food is wasted per year – which costs more than $1,300 per year!
• For Canada as a whole, that amounts to almost 2.3 million tonnes of edible food wasted each year, costing Canadians in excess of $20 billion!

All types of food are wasted, but in Canada the most prominently wasted foods by weight are:

• Vegetables: 30%
• Fruit: 15%
• Leftovers: 13%
• Bread and Bakery: 9%
• Dairy and Eggs: 7%

To put that in perspective, every day in Canada we waste:

• 130,000 heads of lettuce
• 1,300,000 tomatoes
• 2,600,000 potatoes
• 650,000 loaves of bread
• 1,300,000 apples
• 640,000 bananas
• 1,000,000 cups of milk
• and 470,000 eggs

Love Food Hate Waste is a great website for information, recipes, and tips to reduce food waste.