Food Waste in Australia
• Australians are throwing away food worth $5.2 billion a year, with the average household wasting $616 of food a year.
• Australians waste close to 3 million tonnes of food per annum, or 136 kilos per person per annum
• Australians discard up to 20% of the food they purchase = 1 out of every 5 bags of groceries they buy
• An estimated 20 to 40% of fruit and vegetables rejected even before they reach the shops – mostly because they do not match the supermarkets' excessively strict cosmetic standards
• Dumping a kilo of beef wastes the 50,000 litres of water it took to produce that meat, throwing out a kilo of white rice will waste 2,385 litres, and wasting a kilo of potatoes costs 500 litres !

Homelessness and Food Insecurity in Australia
• On any given night there are 105,000 homeless people across the country. That's 1 in every 200 Australians is homeless
• 15 % of clients of major welfare agencies do not enjoy a decent meal at least once a day
• 60,000 low income working families in Australia go without meals or are food insecure
• In Australia one million children go to school without breakfast or bed without dinner every day and two million people rely on food relief in Australia at some point every year
• 24 to 35% of school lunches end up in the bin

Landfill and Environmental Impact in Australia
• 3.28 million tonnes of food is driven to landfill in Australia each year
• 47% of municipal waste to landfill is food and green waste
• Food waste in Australian landfills is the second largest source of methane
• 10% of rich countries' greenhouse gas emissions come from growing food that is never eaten

Worldwide
• The rich countries have nearly twice as much food as is required by the nutritional needs of their populations
• Up to half the entire food supply is wasted between the farm and the fork
• All the world's nearly one billion hungry people could be lifted out of malnourishment on less than a quarter of the food that is wasted in the rich countries
• The bread and other cereal products thrown away in households alone would have been enough to lift 30 million of the world's hungry people out of malnourishment


Referenced from:

-The Australian Institute 'What a waste – An Analysis of household expenditure on food' Nov 2009 D. Baker, J. Fear, R. Denniss
-www.foodwise.com.au
-Australian Bureau of Statistics, Counting the Homeless 2001 (2006)
-Mission Australia, Anglicare, Australian Council of Social Service, Social Policy Research Centre and the Brotherhood of St. Laurence, Left Out and Missing Out: Voices from the Margins (2007) and Left Out and Missing Out: Disability and Disadvantage (2007)
-VIC Health, Healthy Eating – Food Security Investment Plan 2005 – 2010 (August 2005) available at www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/~/media/ResourceCentre/PublicationsandResources/healthy%20eating/VicHealth%20Food%20Insecurity%20Investment%20paper.ashx
www.feeding5k.org/food-waste-facts.php
- Smith, B. (2005), cited in Edwards, F. and Mercer, D. (2007), "Gleaning from Gluttony: An Australian Youth Subculture Confronts the Ethics of Waste", Australian Geographer, vol. 38, no. 3: 279-96, p280
- EcoRecycle Victoria (2005), Information Sheet 2 - Waste Facts, last modified March 2005, from www.sustainability.vic.gov.au/www/html/2039-waste-and-recycling-information-sheets.asp
-www.feeding5k.org/food-waste-facts.php