Food waste quantities and composition in Polish households

Over one-third of the produced food is wasted globally. Most food is wasted at the consumer stage. The use of waste sorting analysis is considered to deliver more precise and less biased results than self-reporting methodologies. Currently, no detailed studies on the amounts and composition of household food waste are available for Poland. In the current paper the results of a food waste generation study in the city of Opole in Poland are presented. Both the residual and biowaste from 1425 citizens living in three different city areas was analysed during five seasonal waste sorting campaigns. The food waste was sorted in 16 avoidable and four non-avoidable fractions. The results of this study showed that in the city of Opole the absolute amount of both the avoidable and non-avoidable food waste is higher in the mixed waste stream than in the biowaste (42.8 kg inh.⁻¹ in the residual waste and 19 kg inh.⁻¹ in the biowaste, yearly). Thus, the total segregation level of food waste constitutes at the moment only 31%. The four main categories of avoidable food waste in the mixed waste are: bread (23.9%), vegetables (23.3%), meat (15.1%) and potatoes (7.8%). For the biowaste, the main four categories include: fruits (35.5%), other vegetables (27.9%), meal leftovers (13.6%) and bread (8.6%). Thus the overall food waste generation is 61.7 kg inh.⁻¹ year⁻¹. When also considering alternative discarding routes (sewerage, fed to animals or home-composted), the total food wastage in Opole amounts to 79.9 kg inh.⁻¹ year⁻¹, out of which 37.1 kg inh.⁻¹ year⁻¹ is avoidable waste and 42.8 kg inh.⁻¹ year⁻¹ non-avoidable waste.