Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent)
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176. To ask the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment if there are any moves being made to stop good food being destroyed at a time when there are thousands of people who cannot afford food (details supplied); and if he will make a statement on the matter. [19947/23]

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. Food donation and redistribution plays an important role in preventing food waste and is a key focus of the Roadmap.

It should be noted that significant volumes of surplus food are already donated by retailers (to FoodCloud, for example) for onward distribution to charities.

Examples of actions in the Roadmap that are aimed at further preventing surplus food in the retail sector 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 EPA’s Food Waste Charter, support a voluntary target with retailers and the processing industry for a percentage of edible food to be donated.