Italy is a country that wastes a great deal of food. Data from the 2013 domestic waste report by Waste Watcher — the new national observatory run by Last Minute Market and Swg together with the Department of Agri-Food Science and Technology at the University of Bologna — reveal that every family throws away an average of 213 grams of food per week, at a cost of 7.06 euros. That means 8.7 billion euros' worth of food ends up in the bin every year. Then there is leftover food in canteens, restaurants, supermarkets, hospitals, and all along the food supply chain from field to table…

Last Minute Market estimates that in a single year it would be possible to recover 1.2 million tonnes of produce abandoned in the fields, approximately 2 million tonnes of food from the agri-food industry, and more than 300,000 tonnes from distribution. These are alarming figures that urgently need to be brought down. Against this backdrop, the Pinpas — Piano nazionale di prevenzione dello spreco alimentare, the national plan for the prevention of food waste — has been established, a long-overdue measure being handled by the working group coordinated by Last Minute Market president Andrea Segrè, a lecturer at the University of Bologna and promoter of the European campaign "Un anno contro lo spreco".

The first concrete initiative within the Pinpas framework is the proclamation, on 5 February, of the national day for the prevention of food waste in Italy. Its aim is not merely to mark a date as a reminder that the problem exists, but to provide an opportunity to plan how to prevent food waste as well as recover it. To this end, the Stati generali di prevenzione dello spreco alimentare in Italia — a consultation convened by the Ministry of the Environment and organised by Last Minute Market — is taking place today at the Temple of Hadrian in Rome, with more than a hundred organisations and several Italian companies involved in the issue having signed up.

The Wwf will also take part in the consultation, contributing to the definition of the Pinpas. Food waste, in fact, also has an environmental impact: producing food that ends up in the bin means squandering precious resources and generating atmospheric emissions. Consider that up to 1,226 million cubic metres of water used to produce food end up as waste in Italy — equivalent to the amount of water consumed every year by 19 million Italians: 46 per cent is linked to meat waste, 29 per cent to cereals and cereal products, 22 per cent to fruit, vegetables and tubers, and 3 per cent to milk and dairy products. Of these, 706 million cubic metres are attributable to households and 520 million cubic metres to losses along the supply chain.

Beyond water, the Wwf points out, food waste also entails around 24.5 million tonnes of CO2, equivalent to approximately 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector: of these, 14.3 million tonnes come from domestic waste and 10.2 million tonnes from losses along the food supply chain. Finally, there is the waste of approximately 228,900 tonnes of reactive nitrogen contained in fertilisers sprayed on fields — a quantity equal to 36 per cent of the total nitrogen released into the environment, which, the Wwf stresses, has been used needlessly, with all the resulting environmental impacts and costs.