Q: We have been told for several years that we are the champions of food waste. I wonder how they manage to count these quantities.
Marcel Hallé
A: This is an excellent question. There are a lot of numbers going around and we don’t often look at how the calculations were done.
Economist Sylvain Charlebois, who teaches at Dalhousie University (Halifax) and contributes to the editorial pages of Press, estimated last year that “the average Canadian household now produces 2.30 kg of waste” on a weekly basis.
How did he come to such a conclusion?
His research team, from Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytical Science Laboratory, asked 8,272 Canadians in August 2020 (during the first wave of the pandemic) to estimate the amount of organic food waste they had wasted in a week.
The team also took the opportunity to ask several questions related to waste.
Thus, 47.9% of households said they were wasting less food in quantity AND overall percentage since the start of the pandemic, while 29% of households said they were wasting less food in quantity, but not as an overall percentage.
It was therefore, according to researchers’ estimates, a marked improvement over what happened before the COVID-19 crisis.
Yet a study carried out before the pandemic by the National Zero Waste Council estimated that Canadian homes wasted an average of 2.03 kg of waste each week. The figures for August 2020 therefore seem to show that food waste in the home while many Canadians were confined has… climbed!
We see here that it is difficult to reach a definitive verdict from the studies that are circulating, which often assess waste by virtue of perception.
“The reports on food waste are always interesting, but they are indicators”, explains Sylvain Charlebois.
And how was the waste in every household in the country estimated before the pandemic?
The National Zero Waste Council reports that the various participating households have been asked to keep a logbook about the composition of their waste. His model was also fed by “studies on the composition of waste carried out by several Canadian municipalities”.
Another thing to consider: several of the studies use the word waste to refer to both avoidable waste (which is lost because it was not eaten) and unavoidable waste (such as eggshells).
Do not forget either that we are talking, in the studies cited here, only of the waste observed in residences in the country.
We know full well that elsewhere, particularly in the retail, agricultural and restaurant sectors, waste is also a serious problem, both embarrassing and costly.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food of Quebec indicates that in the country, 53% of food waste is attributable to “industry”, against 47% to households.
Discover the website of the Ministry
It is therefore not always easy to navigate. There is, however, one constant: all these studies show that we are still wasting far too much food.