Food Waste And Hunger In Australia

A. Background

A. 1.The facts about food waste and hunger in Australia

Australia is a great food-producing county and is truly lucky enough to feed 60 million people [1] which is almost twice as the current estimated population of about 36.24 million people.[2]

However recent research shows that more than 4 million tonnes of food are disposed to landfill each year, of which food retailing accounts for 1.38 million tonnes and 2.6 million tonnes come from Australian household.[3] Every year Australian household throws out upto 20% of the food they purchase, which is $ 8 billion worth of edible food.[3] Studies show that 21.5% of Australian business waste and 40% of household waste is food.[4] The food waste includes chilled and frozen food, fresh fruit and vegetable, packaged and long life food, drink and leftover food. About 20-40% of fruits and vegetables are rejected by the supermarkets and consumers only because they do not meet their high standards.[3]

The dumped food waste breaks down in landfill along with other organic materials and generates a greenhouse gas methane , which is 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide.[5] Approximately 23% of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions is due to the existing food supply system in Australia[6] Wasting food has direct impact on water, energy and other natural resources. For example, throwing out a kilogram of beef wastes 50,000 litres, white rice wastes 1,550 litres and potatoes wastes 500 litres of water.[7]

Even though Australia is lucky enough to be known as a great food producing country, Australia is not lucky enough for many. Surprisingly each year over 2 million people rely on food relief and around half of them are children who go to school without breakfast or bed ...

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...imizes total travel time while satisfying operational constraints (vehicle capacity and visit requirements). Some of the real life applications are collection of municipal waste (Beltrami et al., 1974), delivery options of interlibrary loan items (Francis et al., 2006), pick-up of raw materials for a manufacturer of automobile parts(Alegre et al., 2007), pickup and delivery of surplus food(Davis et al., 2014) etc. [20,21,22,19]

Davis et al. (2014) formulated a periodic VRP with backhauls to determine the collection and delivery schedule of surplus food, which incorporates constraints associated with the available operating time for dispatched vehicles and requirements for weekly collection and delivery.

The review indicates that there are gaps in research related to the logistics of real- time distribution of surplus food which will be investigated in the study.