Italy is about to pass legislation to turn €12 billion worth of food waste into a resource for food pantries and other charities by enabling restaurants and stores to more easily donate excess or about-to-expire foods.
Unlike France, which has enacted serious fines for stores or restaurants that don’t comply, Italy is using incentives, such as giving rebates on garbage disposal fees. Regulations are also being changed to allow once-a-month reporting instead of requiring advance notice for each donation.
Other aspects of the plan to double recovered food to 1 billion tonnes include looking at changing packaging for better preservation and getting consumers to change habits. More detail from TheLocal.it HERE
In my local UK store I can buy a 5 Kilo bag (10 pound) of irregular shaped fruit and veg for £2 ($3) in prime condition. It’s to help low income families but there’s plenty more where it came from. The photo above looks like fruit that’s ready for the trash. That’s not the idea behind the scheme that’s all across Europe.
We’ve seen so many examples of fields of freshly cropped food getting ploughed back into the land because it doesn’t conform to standards. More than enough for the disadvantaged people.
So we have a donation point on the way out of food stores too. Then all donations go to Food Banks in the area.
Waste is waste. There is so much more food can be saved at source – farms – than the pickings of a few restaurants. Stores in the UK already have a tie-in with a deserving local charity for removing oversupply of fresh veg and prepared food.
Garry, it looks like the wonky veggies are fresh but misshapen. A good marketing idea to sell them separately.
I think the idea behind the law is to prevent food waste. There are many tons of food discarded by restaurants and stores every day, as the article lays out. If this food could be channeled to food banks and such a day or two earlier, it would cut down a lot of waste. That is a noble effort, if it works. I like Italy’s law of incentives better than France’s. The carrot is more effective than the stick, in my view.