Food Waste: Advancing the Debate at the EU level

Food waste continues to be a burning issue at European level. Euro Coop wants to see concerted steps being taken to address this problem. We welcomed the European Court of Auditor’s report “Combating Food Waste: an opportunity for the EU to improve the resource-efficiency of the food supply chain” as it provided a critical assessment of the progress that is being made to address the problem of food waste.
Euro Coop has been active in pushing for ambitious legislation to address this problem and its environmental and social implications. In January, we wrote to all members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety to outline the amendments we believed would create the best legislation to govern food waste. We pushed for a common methodology for calculating food waste, the establishment of a hierarchy for food waste, and for binding targets to halve food waste in the EU by 2030.
On 14^th March, the European Parliament voted on the whole “waste package”. They proposed that countries should limit their food waste by 50% compared to 2014 levels. However, these targets are not binding, as we had advocated for. The Parliament will now go into negotiations with the Council of Ministers, which has not yet adopted its own position.
Euro Coop have also been following how our members can take steps to tackle food waste. In February, we circulated a summary of the latest Retail Survey by WRAP to the members of the Sustainability Policy Working Group. It provides excellent insight into the priorities for retailers, as well as highlighting where progress is being made but also where it is lacking.