The new EU-funded project ‘WASTEWISE’ aims to make a contribution to reducing food waste in both Switzerland and Europe. Agroscope supports the project by compiling detailed data, calculating the environmental impact of losses and waste, and examining the nutritional factors.
Every year, around 170kg of food is thrown away per person in Switzerland. Avoiding and reducing food waste is the focus of the Swiss Confederation’s Action Plan to reduce Food Waste as well as the European Green Deal and the ‘Farm to Fork’ strategy. The aim of these three programmes is to promote a sustainable food system.
30% less food waste by 2030
The EU has pledged to reduce retail and consumer food waste per head by 30% by 2030 and to reduce food losses along the production and delivery chains. Launched in November 2024, the EU-funded project WASTEWISE is intended to help achieve these targets. Due to run for three-and-a-half years, the WASTEWISE project will help bridge data gaps in food waste and will incorporate life cycle assessment in the evaluation of food waste.
Bridging food-waste data gaps
Because there are methodological differences in how food-waste data is collected, one of the greatest challenges in combating food waste is to quantify it. There are three potential main reasons for this: (1) the use of differing definitions of food loss and/or waste; (2) inconsistent system boundaries; (3) differing collection methods. WASTEWISE will tackle these problems by checking data quality, identifying and bridging data gaps and providing new, detailed information on food waste.
Including life-cycle assessment in the evaluation of food waste
A further critical challenge consists in the difficulty of combining food-waste data with environmental-impact data. WASTEWISE will develop methods for incorporating environmental impacts into food-waste assessment. It will also consider the feedback effects arising from food-waste prevention. In this way, WASTEWISE will enable a more holistic look at the environmental impacts and nutrient losses caused by food waste, as well as the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of said food waste.
Nine institutions from six countries involved
The WASTEWISE consortium consists of nine institutions from six different countries. Here, Agroscope makes a vital contribution to the collection of detailed data on food waste and to the calculation of the environmental impacts of food waste and food losses throughout Europe. The inclusion of nutrient losses and nutritional factors enables a more complete determination of the environmental impacts.
