Project coordinators – Rosa Del Ponte & Sarah McLoughlin

Food rescue is a means of supplying our Soul Kitchen project and our community service partners food for distribution. The environmental and social benefits are significant. We will be working closely with Blue Mountains City Council and Oz Harvest to establish this effective program.

Oz Harvest have compiled the following statistics:

Food Waste in Australia
• The average household wastes $616 of food a year.
• Australians waste close to 3 million tonnes of food per annum, or 136 kilos per person per annum
• Australians discard up to 20% of the food they purchase = 1 out of every 5 bags of groceries they buy
• An estimated 20 to 40% of fruit and vegetables rejected even before they reach the shops – mostly because of cosmetic standards
• Dumping a kilo of beef wastes the 50,000 litres of water it took to produce that meat, throwing out a kilo of white rice will waste 2,385 litres, and wasting a kilo of potatoes costs 500 litres.

Homelessness and Food Insecurity in Australia
• On any given night there are 105,000 homeless people across the country. That’s 1 in every 200 Australians is homeless
• 15 % of clients of major welfare agencies do not enjoy a decent meal at least once a day
• 60,000 low income working families in Australia go without meals or are food insecure
• In Australia one million children go to school without breakfast or bed without dinner every day and two million people rely on food relief in Australia at some point every year
• 24 to 35% of school lunches end up in the bin

Landfill and Environmental Impact in Australia
• 3.28 million tonnes of food is driven to landfill in Australia each year
• 47% of municipal waste to landfill is food and green waste
• Food waste in Australian landfills is the second largest source of methane
• 10% of rich countries’ greenhouse gas emissions come from growing food that is never eaten

Worldwide
• The rich countries have nearly twice as much food as is required by the nutritional needs of their populations
• Up to half the entire food supply is wasted between the farm and the fork
• All the world’s nearly one billion hungry people could be lifted out of malnourishment on less than a quarter of the food that is wasted in the rich countries
• The bread and other cereal products thrown away in households alone would have been enough to lift 30 million of the world’s hungry people out of malnourishment