British households are throwing away 4.2 million tons of food and drink a year, the equivalent of six meals every week, a study published on Thursday said.
According to the study from the Waste and Resources Action Program (Wrap), about $12.5 billion worth of food and drink was thrown away in 2012, with the average British family wasting nearly $60 a month.
The largest proportion of waste come from fresh fruits and vegetables, trailing behind are bread and milk. The equivalent of 24 million slices of bread were thrown out last year, the government-funded body said.
Unclear labeling and storage information contributed to the waste. The findings represent a 21 percent reduction in food and drink waste since 2007, a decrease of 4.2 million tons Wrap chief executive Liz Goodwin called for avoidable household food waste to be cut by a further 1.7 million tonnes a year by 2025.
"Consumers are seriously worried about the cost of food and how it has increased over recent years," Goodwin said. "Yet as Wrap's research shows, we are still wasting millions of tonnes and billions of pounds. The UK is leading the way in tackling food waste and the 21 percent cut is a terrific achievement by millions of people... However, there is so much more to go for and I believe we should be going for it."
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported global food waste has cost the economy $750 billion a year, accroding to Reuters. According the the U.N. report, global food waste is resulting in 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions and annual economic losses resulting in billion a year.
Every year about a third of all food for human consumption is wasted, along with all the energy, water and chemicals needed to produce it and dispose of it.
According to Reuters, the report calculated that globally a level of water three times greater than the annual flow of Russia's Volga river is required each year to produce food that is ultimately wasted.
In the report, "The Food Wastage Footprint", the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that the carbon footprint of wasted food was equivalent to 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year.
"We all are farmers and fishers; food processors and supermarkets; local and national governments; individual consumers, must make changes at every link of the human food chain to prevent food wastage from happening in the first place, and re-use or recycle it when we can't," FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said in a statement. "In addition to the environmental imperative, there is a moral one: we simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste, when 870 million people go hungry every day."
