Up to half of the world’s food is wasted each year, according to a British study from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME).

The IME has found that between 30 percent to 50 percent of the 4 billion tons of food produced worldwide is never eaten, but thrown away. According to estimates of National Institute of Health, U.S. wastes 40 percent of the food it produces. Last year, Americans threw out about $180 billion worth of food.

IME blamed the problem of huge amount of food waste on bad marketing practices and consumer negligence in developed economies. Supermarkets tend to push consumers to buy more products than they really need, and supermarkets also lose $15 billion each year in unsold fruits and vegetables, according to USDA.

"Food markets are ultimately linked. So the price of corn in the United States has a big impact on the price of corn in Africa, for example. When we're wasting food, it means we're basically taking a resource that can be used to keep other people alive and throwing it away," Gawain Kripke, a research and policy director for Oxfam America, told Huffington Post.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Food-service giant Sodexo gets workers place the food on the scale and record the date, time and usage, before it is discarded to help reduce waste. The data are used to adjust ordering. Sodex could see 50 percent food waste cut in the tests on seven colleges.

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