This is the time for scary stories.
But we’re here to tell a different scary story.
The one about food waste.
It's scarier than it sounds.
A third of the food that is produced globally – nearly 1.3 billion tons of food – is thrown away. Each year.
Not scary enough?
It gets scarier because this food would be enough to feed 3 billion people if it didn’t end up in the trash.
And a quarter of the world’s water goes to the production of this same wasted food.
Scary enough already?
Okay, but everyone’s celebrating, let’s talk about pumpkins.
18,000 tons of pumpkins are thrown away every year around Halloween. But even the wasted potential for food is not the worst thing here – because when they are thrown away, the pumpkins release the harmful greenhouse gas methane, which is one of the main culprits of climate change.
What’s more, it’s estimated that each trick-or-treater creates half a kilo of Halloween trash. Multiply that by the millions of people celebrating and you get a truly horrifying number.
This scary story is a real one – we're living it.
And we need urgent action to reduce food waste and waste.
Saving food is more important than ever.