Buying food at a discount, people feel like fighters for the environment. Businesses pick up on these sentiments and create services that help catering to sell unsold dishes. But there is no legal basis for this in our country yet.
“Many people think that people with low incomes become adherents of foodsharing. But now top managers of companies that can afford to eat in expensive restaurants several times a day are getting involved in the general wave of conscious consumption,” says Maria Makarushkina, partner at Ecopsy Consulting (the company helps clients build corporate culture).
She cites the example of one of her clients, a St. Petersburg IT firm whose CEO suggested that his subordinates pay fines for half-eaten portions of food in the canteen. “People got carried away with the idea. The Clean Plates Society project bore fruit within a few months: people tried to adhere to the principle “It is better to undereat than overeat,” and even at home they began to treat food more prudently,” Makarushkina says.
Every year in our country, about 17 million tons of products are sent to the trash, experts of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC) and the consulting company TIAR-Center calculated. Once in landfills, food emits about 2,4 million tons of methane, a strong greenhouse agent. If these 17 million tons of food could be stored, it would be enough to feed 30 million people for a year. Discarded food makes up about 28% of all municipal solid waste in the country, and ordinary citizens contribute a lot to this figure.
The amount of food wasted worldwide since the beginning of the current year (in tons).
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