Ever struggled to get through an entire bunch of bananas before they go brown? Or opened a packet of bread only to find it encrusted in mould, forcing you to throw it straight in the trash?
If you said yes -- you're not alone.
According to the United Nations Environmental Programme, one third of food produced for human consumption is wasted. That's 1.3 billion tonnes of food each year that are never eaten, yet 795 million people around the globe are malnourished.
It's a problem we can all work together to solve, and a three-year campaign has been launched to help.
Love Food Hate Waste is a joint collaboration between 59 councils across New Zealand and waste industry body WasteMINZ. The $1 million campaign endeavours to reduce the amount of food households are sending to landfills each year through education and events.
Environment Minister Nick Smith says food waste makes hundreds of millions of wasted dollars and creates methane emissions from landfills. He says the campaign has the potential to reduce household costs and the harmful environmental impacts of food waste.
"This campaign is about changing attitudes and getting people to think about reducing food waste in the same way household recycling has become the norm over the past generation."
WasteMINZ sector group co-ordinator Jenny Marshall says whilst it's a national campaign, it's got a local flavour.
Initiatives include a community fruit-picking day in Hamilton on Sunday and a mass cook-off in Alexandra using food scraps.
"[We want] to raise awareness of just how much food people are really wasting, and then give them the skills and the knowledge they need to really make a difference," Ms Marshall says.
Kiwi households throw away 122,547 tonnes of food each year worth around $872 million -- enough food to feed the population of Dunedin for two years.
What's more, the average family chucks out three shopping trolleys' worth of food each year. The most commonly wasted food is bread -- with 20 million loaves sent to rot -- followed by leftovers, potatoes, apples, chicken, bananas and lettuces.
As well as being wasteful it's environmentally damaging too, given the amount of energy expended producing food that isn't eaten. If food waste was a country it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States.
Newshub.
