Written answers
Thursday, 27 April 2023
Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment
Food Waste
Jim O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay South, Fianna Fail)
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119. To ask the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment the steps his Department is taking to tackle food waste. [19716/23]
Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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My Department published Ireland’s National Food Waste Prevention Roadmap 2023-2025 in November 2022. The Roadmap sets out a number of priority actions to bring the focus on food waste prevention, across key sectors in the food supply chain, together in a coherent manner.
For example in relation to the retail sector, actions under the Roadmap aimed at preventing surplus food being wasted include:
- Investigate the potential impact of a prohibition on the destruction of edible food in advance of its ‘use-by’ date.
- Investigate the regulatory and legal barriers to ‘Good Samaritan’ acts of donation and whether mandatory donation of edible food from retail outlets would reduce food waste.
- Using the Environmental Protection Agency’s [EPA's] Food Waste Charter, support a voluntary target with retailers and the processing industry for a percentage of edible food to be donated.
My Department also provides funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, which operates the 'Stop Food Waste' campaign which has been highly successful in tacking food waste in the household sector as part of its wider food waste prevention programme.
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