Food loss and waste
Food waste has a huge economic, social and environmental impact. Over 58 milllion tonnes of food waste (131 kg/inhabitant) are generated in the EU each year. This represents an estimated loss of €132 billion.
Around 10% of all food supplied to retail, restaurants, food services (e.g., school and corporate canteens, hospitals, etc.) and households is wasted. At the same time, over 37 million people cannot afford a quality meal (including meat, chicken, fish or vegetarian equivalent) every second day.
Food waste has a huge environmental impact, accounting for 254 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents or about 16% of the total greenhouse gas emissions from the EU food system. If food waste were a Member State, it would be the fifth largest emitter of GHG emissions. Wasting food also puts unnecessary burden on limited natural resources, such as land and water use..
About this site
The EU Food Loss and Waste Prevention Hub is a website for stakeholders who take action to fight food losses and food waste.
The website allows you to share good practices (Resources page), to find relevant information on national actions, such as policies and legislative developments (Member States pages) and to stay up-to-date with EU funded project developments and results (EU funded projects page). The main objective of this platform is to foster the exchange of knowledge and experience and to help disseminate the different initiatives carried out to tackle food losses and food waste, in order to inspire and drive further action on ground, across the EU and beyond.
Any stakeholder active in the area of food loss and waste prevention in Europe can become a member and share resources and news. We also welcome contributions from international organisations with a global impact, as well as from national authorities from non-EU countries. In order to share information, you need to register by creating an EU LOGIN account (please find detailed instructions on the Sign in page). We encourage you to read the Terms and conditions carefully, before submitting content to the website.
You do not need to register in order to navigate through the website. All pages are publicly available. Member States pages are kept up-to-date by national experts, appointed by Member States’ competent authorities.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.
REFRESH – Community of Experts (CoE)
The EU Food Loss and Waste Prevention Hub builds on the work of the REFRESH Community of Experts website, created under the EU-funded REFRESH project as a database of food waste prevention initiatives. The Commission contributed to the REFRESH Community of Experts website during its development. As the REFRESH project came to an end in June 2019, the Commission has taken steps to ensure the continuity of the database of resources, by transferring these to the EU Food Loss and Waste Prevention Hub.