Petr Jehlička: The mystery of the missing food waste

It’s official: in 2020 Czech mainstream households produced 40.1% (37.4 kg per person per year; Kubíčková et al. 2021) of the average European Union household food waste (91.7 kg; calculated as 53% of the overall food waste of 173 kg per person per annum; Laaninen and Calasso, 2020). In reality, the Czech percentage will be a little higher, as it does not include inedible food waste, whereas the EU average does. Another limitation is that the Czech data do not include food waste that ends up in ‘biowaste’ bins or is flushed down the toilet. It includes only that food waste which ends up in mixed waste (municipal waste) bins.

Nevertheless, it can be safely concluded that if the current EU-wide average of household food waste of 91.7 kg per person per year were considered the baseline amount for Czechia in 2021, the country would have already met and exceeded – a decade earlier – both the European Commission’s commitment to halving the amount of food waste in the EU by 2030 and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals’ target 12.3, which is to ‘halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels’. For Czech food waste researchers – job done then? Not quite. Far from it, in fact.

In the light of these findings, quite why official international documents such as UNEP’s Food Waste Index Report 2021 attribute fairly high volumes of food waste (70 kg per person per year) to Czech households remains a bit of a mystery. At least the Report indicates a very low level of confidence in this figure. This uncertainty just seems to underline the notoriously unreliable figures concerning reported volumes of food waste, which most researchers put down to the diversity of data collection and data analysis methods.

But this uncertainty should no longer undermine the efforts to address the issue of food waste. Highly reliable data on food waste in Czechia, based on anonymous sampling of waste collected from households (repeatedly several times a year, i.e. not as a snapshot), and their analyses are now available (Kubíčková et al. 2021; Kormaňáková et al. 2021). In the case of Kubíčková and her colleagues’ research, food waste was collected from 900 households in Brno, the second largest Czech city, during three consecutive years. Kormaňáková and her collaborators analysed waste collected from hundreds of inhabitants of the small town of Boskovice (population 12 000) during two – summer and autumn – periods of the year. The results of the latter research project produced even more staggering figures than in Brno. Calculated per person per year, the amount of edible food waste in Boskovice ranged from 2 kg to 31 kg, depending on the type of residential area. These findings are upheld by an earlier research project on food waste in the rural environment. On the basis of a detailed analysis of bins with municipal mixed waste in a tiny village, Daniel Sosna and his colleagues (2018) discovered that rural dwellers produced as little as 7.9 kg of edible food waste per person per annum.

However, the mysteries do not stop here. One thing that I found really puzzling was that the above mentioned recent projects on household food waste conducted by Czech scholars (Nováková et al. 2021; Kormaňáková et al. 2021; Kubíčková et al. 2021) were all justified by the need to find ways of reducing waste. Sure, it is good to avoid complacency and to keep looking for opportunities for further decreases of the food waste volume. And yes, as EU member states are obliged to set up municipal programmes aimed at reducing the amount of food waste to meet the EU-wide indicative target of halving household food waste by 2030, the information about the volumes and composition of household food waste is useful.

But still, I can’t help feeling that there is risk of this being an opportunity lost. While the real challenge for Czech authorities in the next decade is likely to be how to make sure that food waste volumes do not rise, I’d expect researchers to jump on these revelations as a unique research opportunity. Because to me, the real mystery of this story is this: Where is the missing waste? How is it that Czech households produce so little food waste? These are crucial questions, given the gravity of the food waste problem for food security and climate change (food waste is an important source of greenhouse gases). The problem is that nobody knows the answer.

Czech research institutes concerned with food waste sit a on a research treasure trove. They should seize this opportunity to turn the country’s academia into a global food waste research powerhouse. They should seek to shape international scholarship on household food waste by drawing on knowledge about how Czech households are able to limit the volume of food waste to the extent that they already meet the ambitious EU waste reduction target.

The thing is that if households in all EU member states wasted as little food as Czech ones, the food waste problem would be half-solved, and the EU-wide indicative target met. Taking this line of thinking further, Czechia should take a lead in EU initiatives aimed at developing know-how on the ways of limiting food waste.

This is really important, as I somehow cannot convince myself that the measures proposed in the 2018 EU waste directive, such as providing ‘incentives for the collection of unsold food products at all stages of the food supply chain and for their safe redistribution, including to charitable organisations’ and raising ‘consumer awareness of the meaning of “use-by” and ”best-before” dates’ will be enough to ‘do the trick’ and cut the amount of household food waste by 50% in less than a decade.

It’s really important to get to the bottom of the food waste issue. Let me illustrate its urgency by just two figures: According to the EU-funded EU FUSIONS project, food waste that is generated along the whole food chain, accounts for 227 million tonnes of CO2 eq. per year, which approximately equates to 6% of total EU greenhouse gas emissions. It is also estimated that the amount of food wasted by households in the global North is almost equivalent to the amount of food produced in sub-Saharan Africa (Evans, 2020).

We need to complement the calls to improve our understanding of use-by dates and to reorganise our fridges – measures aimed at reducing food waste that are based on the ‘learned intentionality’ approach (Barnett and Land, 2007) – with a different approach. My money’s on things that are more ‘invisible’. I take the cue from the findings of previous research projects on food self-provisioning (or household food production) in which I was involved, and which touched on the issue of food waste. I believe that the key to the mystery of low to negligible amounts of food waste produced by Czech households lies primarily in the sphere of everyday practices and routinised behaviours and related skills and knowledge. These practices resemble what my CESCAME colleague Slávka Ferenčuhová (2021) calls, in the context of her research on people’s everyday responses to climate change, ‘inconspicuous adaptations’. By which she means everyday, routine, hidden, habitual and unreflexive behaviours, which make a difference but which are not ostensibly communicated by their practitioners to others.

To start unravelling the mystery of the missing food waste, I commissioned six focus groups held in Brno in autumn 2021, with participants from three types of residential areas in Brno (two focus groups in each area – blocks of flats, private villas and rural houses with gardens on Brno outskirts), from which Kubíčková and her colleagues collected and analysed the volume and structure of food waste. I am planning to do a detailed analysis of this data later in 2022 – watch this space! – but at this point, I want to share a couple of quotations as a teaser. They illustrate ordinary urban residents’ deep emotions and strong, morally inflected feelings about the unacceptability of food waste that are more often than not unrelated to pro-environmental motivations:

With food, it’s….one could have simply made use of it, no matter what he says…it could have been given to someone (as a gift). So it’s…how to say…It’s a failure, in fact, when one has to throw something (food) away. Compared to throwing away other things, it’s a failure, because it was possible to prevent it from happening.

(A focus group participant on the difference between throwing away food and other things)

 When it comes to carrots, for example….so I buy a kilo and it happened a lot that I just had it in the fridge in the wrapper and then it went bad and then I read that it's good to peel them all and put them in water somewhere, then they last longer.

 (Keeping) bread and pastries in the freezer has worked out well for us, too. It lasts quite a long time there, then, I don't know, it doesn't thaw that fast for us, but then you just leave it on the counter normally, it thaws and you can eat it for the next two days just fine.

(Two focus group participants on the skills of waste reduction)

Let me conclude with a universal truth from another focus group participant:

You're not supposed to go (food) shopping when you're hungry. It feels as if you will eat everything and then you come home and find that you can’t quite manage….

Published: 14. 3. 2022

Barnett, Clive, David Land. 2007. „Geographies of Generosity: Beyond the ‘Moral Turn’“. Geoforum 38: 1065–1075.

European Commission. 2020. Farm to Fork Strategy: For a fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly food system. Online. Available at https://ec.europa.eu/food/horizontal-topics/farm-fork-strategy_en. Accessed 11 February 2022.

Evans, David (2020): „Foreword“. Pp. v-vii, in Food Waste Management: Solving the Wicked Problem, ed. by E. Närvänen, N. Mesiranta, M. Mattila, A. Heikkinen. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ferenčuhová, Slavomíra. 2021. „Inconspicuous adaptations to climate change in everyday life: Sustainable household responses to drought and heat in Czech cities“. Journal of Consumer Culture. ONLINE FIRST.

Kormaňáková, Marcela, Marcela Remešová, Terézia Vančová. 2021. „Food waste in municipal mixed waste produced at household level: empirical evidence from the Czech Republic“. Journal of Material Cycles and Waste Management 23: 1348-1364.

Kubíčková, Lea, Lucie Veselá, Marcela Kormaňáková. 2021. „Food Waste Behaviour at the Consumer Level: Pilot Study on Czech Private Households“. Sustainability 13, No. 1311.

Laaninen, Tarja, Maria Paola Calasso. 2020. Reducing food waste in the European Union. EPRS | European Parliamentary Research Service, Members' Research Service, PE 659.376 – December 2020. Online. Available at https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/659376/EPRS_BRI(2020)659376_EN.pdf. Accessed 18 February 2022.

Nováková, Petra, Tomáš Hák, Svatava Janoušková. 2021. „An Analysis of Food Waste in Czech Households—A Contribution to the International Reporting Effort“. Foods 10(4), No. 875.

Sosna, Daniel, Lenka Brunclíková, Patrik Galeta. 2019. „Rescuing things: Food waste in the rural environment in the Czech Republic“. Journal of Cleaner Production 214: 319-330.

United Nations Environment Programme. 2021. Food Waste Index Report 2021. Nairobi.