3Our production, distribution and consumption of food have a significant impact on our environment. Considerable focus has recently been put on theneed to improve resource-efficiency in our society. Reducing the large volumes of food waste will be a key part of this challenge. It is also important toseparate and make biogas from the food waste that nevertheless is generated. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (Swedish EPA) has been working for a number of years to produce data and calculate food waste volumes – it is important to know how large these volumes are and where they are generated in order to monitor objectives andimplement appropriate measures and instruments.

This report summarizes food waste volumes for 2012 and presents recalculated figures for 2010. The volumes for each sector are given in Table 1 below. Each chapter contains a description of how thevolumes have been calculated.

As can be seen in the above table, households are responsible for the largest volumes of food waste. About 35 percent of their food waste is unnecessary food waste, i.e. food that could have been eaten if it had been handled differently (SMED 2011). There is currently no comprehensive data for agriculture and fishing (primary production). Only unnecessary food waste is presented for industry. If we were to include what is called “unavoidable” food waste, the total volume from industry would amount to 642,000 tonnes.

The differences between the 2010 data presentedhere and the data previously reported for 2010 (Jensen et al. 2010) are due to the fact that all waste factors have now been updated and the data is therefore more comprehensive than previously – the increase for 2010 is not therefore due to greater waste volumes but to an improvement in thecalculation method.