The results of our EU food waste survey are out!

A scandalous 140.6 million tonnes* of food is wasted in the EU every year – more food than the EU imports, according to Foodrise EU’s recent report No Time To Waste. Food waste costs EU businesses and households an estimated €143bn a year, and causes at least 6% of the EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Yet left to voluntary measures, EU progress to reduce food waste has been slow.

Now, the EU faces a historic opportunity. The European Commission will soon release proposals for legally binding EU targets to reduce food waste – a historic move. However, everything is still at stake: targets may be set too low, large portions of the supply chain like farms and processing might be excluded, and some member states are trying to scrap legally binding targets completely.

Luckily, a movement is building around Europe for ambitious action on food waste. Over 40 organisations ranging from NGOs to businesses and research institutions have signed a joint-statement calling on the EU to set legally binding targets to reduce food waste by 50% from farm to fork by 2030. But it will be vital to get policymakers from across Europe backing the fight for regulation to end food waste too. That’s why Foodrise EU and European Environmental Bureau have collaborated to create a short survey asking EU member states for their views on EU legally binding food waste targets.

Map of EU member state positions

Click here to see the full league table

Our methodology

We targeted the Ministries for the Environment and Agriculture for each country, via email. We sent all EU member states 3 key questions about their stance on potential legally binding EU food waste targets, by email. Their responses were scored according to the following system:

• Yes (+1 point)
• Unsure/neutral (0 points)
• No (-1 point)

These scores are combined to create an overall score for each country ranging from -3 to +3.

Countries who failed to respond to our survey by the deadline were given the lowest possible total score of -4 points.

What now?

The support of these Ministries will be essential to getting ambitious targets voted through, through member state representatives to the European Council. If you would like to raise pressure on your country’s government to back ambitious EU food waste targets, please contact martin@foodrise.org.uk for more info and support. If you’re an EU-based organisation who’d like to support our joint-statement, please sign up here.

* Please note that this figure has been slightly updated since the publishing of the ‘No Time To Waste’ report, in line with the new EU food waste figures published to Eurostat in October 2022