Abu Dhabi: About 39 per cent of over 1.1 million tonnes of municipal waste annually generated in Abu Dhabi is mainly leftover food discarded by residents.

If residents are aware of negative impacts of food waste, its quantity can be considerably reduced, a senior official told Gulf News yesterday.

Tonnes of food discarded by residents can be reduced, if everyone changes one’s own habits, Fozeya Ibrahim Al Mahmoud, Director of Environmental Outreach Division at The Environment Agency — Abu Dhabi, said.

These wasted food also contributes to losing land to landfills, carbon emissions and climate change, she said.

Considering this adverse impacts of food waste, the EAD is marking today’s World Environment Day, that is being held this year under the theme “Think.Eat.Save”. It is organising a number of activities to increase the community’s awareness on the environmental impact of the food choices, said a press release issued by the agency yesterday.

The activities will encourage public to make wise decisions when buying their groceries and when cooking their meals in order to waste as little food as possible.

“Think.Eat.Save” is an anti-food waste and food loss campaign that encourages public to reduce their carbon food print. Carbon food-print is the amount one contributes to global warming by greenhouse gases due to the foods one chooses.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), every year 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted. This is equivalent to the same amount produced in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, one in every seven people in the world go to bed hungry and more than 20,000 children under the age of five die daily from hunger.

“Changing our current living standards requires us to adopt innovative and creative solutions on the way we use and dispose the products and services we own and consume,” Fozeya said.

“There are many possibilities as for how we can change our unsustainable consumption habits while also improving our quality of life,” she said. To do more with less is essential for us to live within the resources the planet has to offer, she pointed out.

Explaining how food waste causes climate change, the official said, while many food products are ultimately biodegradable, its non-consumption means that precious resources used in its cultivation and productions are wasted, such as energy, water and materials used for its packaging. Carbon emissions resulting from the food’s transportation, storage and disposal also contribute to climate change, Fozeya said.

She said Abu Dhabi is facing this issue especially in Ramadan, where a lot of food is discarded. All residents in Abu Dhabi can reduce their environmental impacts and still live comfortably. “By reducing, reusing and recycling, we can all play a part in resolving the problem of our growing waste,” she urged.

EAD has agreed with Saving Grace Project team and a Quattro Group to donate approximately 250 meals daily of their leftover food to needy people over the next five years.

On Friday preachers at Abu Dhabi mosques will also highlight the theme of this day.

The agency will circulate the tools it developed to help government agencies, private companies and general public to raise awareness on food waste, including an email with “Top 10 tips on how to reduce food waste”.