Spain's first-ever anti-food waste law: Here's what's involved
Thursday, October 14, 2021 @ 10:41 AM
FOOD waste is bad news for the health of our planet, and a high level of it could be avoided – in fact, Spain's government has just introduced the country's first-ever law regulating use and disposal of edibles.
The Council of Ministers has taken on board warnings from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and its Sustainable Development Objectives (SDOs), which are based upon figures showing that a third of the human food produced on earth every year is thrown away uneaten.
According to Spain's ministry for agriculture, fishing and food, in 2020 alone, a total of 1.363 billion tonnes of food was binned.
Putting this in perspective, says the ministry, it means every single person in Spain chucks out 31 kilos of food annually – the equivalent of the average body weight of a nine- or 10-year-old child per inhabitant every year.
Excess emissions and land use, wasted water...
The negative effects of food waste mean that land for crops and grazing is used which does not need to be – often resulting in deforestation, or chopping down trees that provide oxygen and reduce harmful carbon dioxide emissions – chemical fertilisers are hard to avoid in mass production, which is why organic produce is more expensive as less of it is yielded in an average season, water is used for food which goes straight into the bin, and energy consumed and, with it, emissions that trap heat within the earth's atmosphere, when it could have been saved.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com