While exploring Information is Beautiful‘s list of projects earlier this year, I decided to create my own infographics on food waste, using what they did here as a starting point. As luck would have it, in March the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) published a new version of its Food Waste Index Report; this data is for the year 2022, whereas the previous report looked at figures for 2019.
I started by doing a deep dive into existing statistics and studies on the subject of food waste. While I’ve only used some of this data and research – mainly figures from the UN and a series of specific studies – I generally prefer to explore and examine a subject/project in depth before delimiting what I’m going to use myself. The references cited in the infographics are included below!


Sources
- Food and Agriculture Organization (2013) Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on natural resources. Technical Report.
- United Nations Environment Programme (2024) Food Waste Index Report 2024. Think Eat Save: Tracking Progress to Halve Global Food Waste.
- Zhu, J., Luo, Z., Sun, T., Li, W., Zhou, W., Wang, X., & Fei, W. (2023) Cradle-to-Grave Emissions from Food Loss and Waste Represent Half of Total Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Food Systems. Nature Food, Vol. 4; March 2023, 247-256.
- Crippa, M., Solazzo, E., Guizzardi, D., Monforti-Ferrario, F., Tubiello, F. N., & Leip, A. (2021) Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions. Nature Food, 2:3, 198–209.
- Klaura, J., Breeman, G., & Scherer, L. (2023) Animal lives embodied in food loss and waste. Sustainable Production and Consumption. Volume 43: December 2023, 308-318.
- Mbow, C., C. Rosenzweig, L.G. Barioni, T.G. Benton, M. Herrero, M. Krishnapillai, E. Liwenga, P. Pradhan, M.G. Rivera-Ferre, T. Sapkota, F.N. Tubiello & Y. Xu, (2019) Food Security. In: Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes interrestrial ecosystems, 437-550 [P.R. Shukla, J. Skea, E. Calvo Buendia, V. Masson-Delmotte, H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, P. Zhai, R. Slade, S. Connors, R. van Diemen, M. Ferrat, E. Haughey, S. Luz, S. Neogi, M. Pathak, J. Petzold, J. Portugal Pereira, P. Vyas, E. Huntley, K. Kissick, M. Belkacemi, J. Malley, (eds.)].