• About FOODcents
  • Eat Smart
    • Christmas 2012 (new)
    • Understanding Nutrition
    • Food Safety
    • Cook Your Own
    • Making the Most of Fruit & Veg
    • Making the Most of Meat
    • Grow Your Own
    • Avoid Waste
    • Recipes
  • Shop Smart
    • 10-plan
    • Price per kilo
    • Reading Food Labels
    • Explore Your Pantry
• Take on the Takeaway
• Advisors
• FOODcents Training
• Workshops
• Crisis and Emergency Relief
• Contact

Avoid Waste

Wasting food is a major problem in Australia, costing us money and harming the environment.

Uneaten food in Australia costs us $5.2 billion every year. This includes $1.1 million of wasted fruit and vegetables; costing each household around $616 per year.

Australians waste about 3 million tonnes of food every year; about 136kg of waste per person every year.

Surprisingly, smaller households tend to waste more food per person than large households.

Research suggests that we waste so much food because:

• We cook too much food,
• food goes off before the use-by/best-before date,
• we forget about leftovers in the fridge or freezer,
• we don’t know how to use leftovers,
• we buy too much because we don’t stick to a shopping list,
• we don’t check the cupboard or fridge before going shopping, and
  
• we’re not planning our meals and menus as much as we could

To help reduce the amount of food you waste, the amount of packaging you send to landfill and the amount of money you spend on food, try the following:

Buy Less

Only buy what you really need, and choose fresh foods over packaged foods. Explore your pantry to use make us of what you already have.

Use Scraps

Try and avoid fruit and vegetable waste by using as much of the flesh as you can. Use off-cuts (like celery tops, carrot tops, peels and onion outer layers) to make stocks for soup or stock.

Freeze Leftovers

Before serving, put the extra portions of a meal into containers for tomorrow's lunch/next weeks easy meal. This way your left overs wont be eaten and wont be left on the plate to be thrown out either.

Compost Vegies

Composting turns vegetable scraps and garden waste into a nutrient rich soil improver for your garden. You will be using your waste, reducing greenhouse emissions from landfill and helping to improve your garden - for free!

For more information on how to compost, visit the cleanup site. 

For more information on reducing household waste, visit the NSW Government's Love Food Hate Waste website.

Page last updated Wed, 23 Jun 2010 10:00 am