This piece from nonprofit food media outlet The Counter explains why some farmers in the US have been dumping surplus food during the COVID-19 pandemic, at the same time that food banks are struggling to source enough food.

This book presents recent developments, trends and challenges in turning food waste into products such as biofuel, enzymes, biopolymers and animal feed. 

This book examines the material properties and sustainability of various polymers that can be used for food packaging, such as bioplastics and edible food packaging.

This e-book from the international climate nonprofit Project Drawdown reviews the world’s options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The top solutions related to food and land (see section 1.2 of the book) are reducing food waste, shifting to plant-rich diets, protecting ecosystems such as peatland and forests, and shifting agricultural practices (e.g. improving rice production).

This report from the UK think tank Green Alliance argues that the problem of plastic pollution cannot be solved by simply replacing plastic with alternative materials - instead, a system-wide transition to a circular economy is required, prioritising safety, sustainability and efficiency. The report focuses on the UK’s culture of single-use packaging.

FCRN member Margareta Lelea of the German Institute for Tropical and Subtropical Agriculture (DITSL) has co-authored this paper, which uses the example of the pineapple supply chain in Uganda to argue that efforts to reduce post-harvest losses often neglect the uses of waste streams by local people.

This report sets out the results of the European Union-funded REFRESH Project: Resource Efficient Food and dRink for the Entire Supply cHain. The project aimed to reduce food waste in the EU by developing an evidence base on consumer and business behaviour, assessing the environmental benefits of avoiding food waste, and designing technology to add value to food waste streams.

This paper by Verma et al., with FCRN member Thom Achterbosch as co-author, estimates that consumers across the world are probably wasting over twice as much food as previously believed. The study is based on the FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets, but goes further than the Food and Agriculture Organisation in that it factors in how consumer affluence affects food waste. It finds that once people spend more than $6.70 per day (in total, not just on food), food waste starts to rise - suggesting that consumer food waste is an issue even in lower-middle income countries, not only in wealthier countries.

This book addresses food waste from a variety of perspectives, including agriculture, food science, industrial ecology, history, economics, consumer behaviour, geography, theology, planning, sociology, and environmental policy.