• Economics
• Environment

A roadmap to reduce food waste in Europe

REFRESH is an EU research project dedicated to contributing to the achievement of Target 3 of Sustainable Development Goal 12, which aims to halve per capita food waste at the retail and consumer level as well as to reduce food losses along the food chain by 2030. Partners across Europe are collecting data on methods to decrease or repurpose food waste. In developed countries an estimated 30 to 40% of food is wasted. About half of this waste stems from consumers, while the remaining part is lost through the other phases of the Food Supply Chain (FSC): farm practices, transport and processing, and the retail sector (FAO, 2011; Godfray et al., 2010).To meet target 12.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals, a better understanding of food waste drivers is needed, both at the consumer and at the retail level. More importantly, the effectiveness of tailored interventions to reduce food waste at every level of the FSC needs to be assessed. Research on food waste faces several issues. On one side, there is large number of factors influencing the behaviour of Food Supply Chain actors, on the other side, food waste research often lacks reliable data on the amounts of food wasted along FSC. One of the possibilities to reduce food waste is the adoption of tailored innovations aiming at prevention and reduction of food waste. Currently there are many initiatives in this direction. However, there is a lack of information on effects of such interventions, since they are usually not large-scaled and have more of the local character. In this work, issues related to the complexity of the food waste phenomenon and to the lack of reliable data are tackled using a simulation approach.