France bans supermarkets from throwing away edible food

By July of next year grocery stores in France will be obligated by law to donate unsold food to charities, or for use in animal feed and compost. Worldwide, close to half of all food produced is thrown away. While only 11% of all food thrown out comes from food retailers, we (the consumers), contribute up to 67% of food thrown away (a better breakdown of the statistics here: http://bit.ly/1dvmWT5).

Not only does food waste cost countries billions of dollars each year, but food waste is also a huge factor in rising greenhouse gas emissions and climate change…
Developed nations waste 222 million tonnes of food per year. All the resources that went into producing that food, lost for naught. Remember those droughts we’ve been plagued with lately, think of all the water it took to produce all that food! Not to mention the land, energy [those fossil fuels! (‘◕‸◕´)], and labour costs. Sounds like a lot of money down the drain.
Rotting food creates methane, which is 23x more potent than CO2, thus making the amount of food decomposing in landfills a huge contributor to global warming.

(You can find a more comprehensive list of facts here http://bit.ly/1m3Yg2y)

Here’s hoping France is the first of many countries to do this!

What are your thoughts?

-A