National Food Waste Strategy: Halving Australia’s food waste by 2030

Published on March 6, 2023

The Strategy provides a framework to support collective action towards halving Australia’s food waste by 2030. The Strategy adopts a circular economy approach, promoting collaborative action across the food supply chain, and prioritises food waste avoidance over resource reuse, recycling, reprocessing, and energy recovery and disposal.

The National Food Waste Strategy: Halving Australia’s food waste by 2030 (the Strategy) provides a framework to support collective action towards halving Australia’s food waste by 2030.

The Strategy adopts a circular economy approach to capture food as a resource and to keep those resources in use for as long as possible to minimise negative impacts. The Strategy also promotes approaches in accordance with the food waste hierarchy which favours food waste avoidance over reuse, recycling, reprocessing, energy recovery and disposal. The use of a circular economy approach and the food waste hierarchy demands a strategic and collaborative approach to finding solutions across the entire food supply chain.

The Strategy acknowledges that Australia has a highly productive and profitable food and agribusiness industry, a diverse range of hospitality and food service industries, and numerous food rescue charities and community groups that help food insecure Australians. To meet the target to halve food waste in Australia by 2030, the Strategy recognises that all Australians must work together, across the food supply chain to:

- collaborate to achieve common or coinciding goals,

- innovate to find new solutions and change the way things are done, and

- share knowledge and data to be better informed in decision making.

The Strategy seeks to leverage the efforts of food waste initiatives already underway in Australia. This includes work undertaken by all levels of government, industry and business, food rescue organisations and academia.

The Strategy identifies four priority areas where improvements can be made:

Priority Area 1–Policy support – Policies are supportive of food waste avoidance, reduction and repurposing.

Priority Area 2–Business improvements – Improvement and adoption of technologies, processes and actions to avoid and reduce food waste.

Priority Area 3–Market development – Development of markets to support the repurposing of food waste.

Priority Area 4–Behaviour change – Practices and attitudes towards avoiding and reducing food waste are adopted and sustained.