At the end of last month, the commission of agriculture, fishing and food of the Congress approved the opinion of the bill for the prevention of food losses and waste. The text, sent to the plenary of the Lower House to continue with its processing, includes the objectives set by the UN for 2030 that pursue, among other things, an ambitious reduction compared to 2020 of 50% of food waste per capita in the level of retail and consumption. Yes, it is in the homes where more food continues to be discarded, and the administrations want to remedy it.

Eurostat data exemplify this. In 2020, Europeans wasted an average per capita of 131 kg per year (a figure that imputes to each citizen all the losses registered in the different phases of the chain). Of those 131 kg, 78 are attributable to household waste, 53% of the total. Spain is below this average, with the total discarded being 90 kilos per capita, of which 30 come from homes (33%).

“The problem is important”, explains José María Gil, professor at the UPC and director of Creda (UPC-IRTA). “We don’t value food enough,” he laments.

According to data from the food waste quantification panel in Spanish households, prepared by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, in the autumn-winter 2018-2019 (after several periods of a general downward trend) the highest value of the series: 712.2 million kg of waste. In total, 1,352.5 million kg were discarded in 2019, 1% more than in 2018. In 2020 the figure tended to stabilize, although it also grew: 1,364 million kg of food ended up in the trash. In favor of the citizens, it should be said that, due to the pandemic, much more was cooked at home and, despite this, the waste was similar to that of 2019.

In this period, however, there was a curious change in trend: less fresh food was discarded (compared to previous periods) and more processed. There was “a return to the kitchens and the recipes [food discarded after having been cooked or used in some type of preparation] played a fundamental role, reaching very important levels in terms of waste,” says the quantification panel.

In the spring-summer of 2019, for example, almost 570 million kilos of unused products (mostly fruits, vegetables and vegetables) were thrown into the garbage can for almost 99 million kilos of recipes. In the following semester, the decline continued in unused products (just over 532 million kg) and the growth in prescriptions (almost 111 million kg). Also in the spring-summer of 2020 (500 million for 150).

The peak of this trend would come in the following semester (autumn 2020 and winter 2021) with almost 499 million kg of unused products wasted and 172 million kg of recipes thrown into the garbage can. “It is very curious. We were all pastry chefs in a pandemic for a few months. Maybe we overproduced or what we did was inedible”, reflects Gil.

After the stabilization of the figures in 2020, a slight decrease came in 2021 (the last year for which there are data). The course closed with 1,246 million kg discarded (8.7% less than in 2020).

If age is taken into account, those over 50 years of age were responsible for 1 out of every two kilograms of discarded prescriptions (51.2%). Regarding unused products, they generated 45.4% of waste.

It also increased – they underline from the panel – “awareness of waste”: more than 1 in 4 households did not throw away any type of food (26%), while in 2020 it was 24.7%.

“There are no reliable indicators yet, but it seems that in 2022, and especially in 2023, waste has been reduced a lot,” predicts Gil. Although one would like to think that this reduction responds to greater awareness, there is a variable that cannot go unnoticed. “The greatest positive effect could be due to the increase in prices,” says Gil.

Also in 2021, where products such as meat and fish, as well as rice and pasta, “had a significant price increase,” the panel asserts. “We work by incentives,” argues Gil. “We value the scarce, and the prices reflect the scarcity a bit.”

Jordi Oliver, executive director of Inèdit, a strategic eco-innovation studio born from the UAB, sees it in the same way. “I don’t think that suddenly the public is more aware. I’m sure there’s an economic reason.”

It is difficult to know, according to Gil, if there are other variables that could be helping to reduce waste and to what extent. And all due to the lack of joint action, he says, to know how to proceed and what results the actions carried out have obtained.

“There should be much more collaboration between all the agents in the chain. Even replicate what the EU has done, which has created a commission of experts to agree on what can be done.

In his opinion, the lack of a consensus is reflected in the Eurostat data. “They are very heterogeneous. We do not know if this is because each country is free to establish the quantification method or that the situation is very different in each state”. And he gives the example of Cyprus. “They award you 400 kg of waste per capita, but only 20% at the consumer level. Is very striking”.

Hence, he advocates the need “to be able to have a method that can be used consistently over time.” Above all, to really know “what measures are effective and efficient to reduce waste and can be extrapolated and replicated in many places ”.

What matters -he stresses- “is the reduction”: “If I have a blurred photo, but I always have that blurred photo, I will be able to see more or less the evolution. I want to see what happened at the beginning and at the end, I am not so interested in the quantity as in the reduction”.