As much as half of all the food produced in the world – equivalent to two billion tonnes – ends up as waste every year, engineers warned in a report published on Thursday.
The UK’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME) blames the “staggering” new figures in its analysis on unnecessarily strict sell-by dates, buy-one-get-one free and Western consumer demand for cosmetically perfect food, along with “poor engineering and agricultural practices”, inadequate infrastructure and poor storage facilities.
