The DOI matches its Crossref record; 85 of the 85 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Nutritional and environmental losses embedded in global food waste
Open accessAbstract
Reducing food waste can contribute positively towards multiple sustainable development goals (SDGs) but the differences in the food waste across countries in terms of embedded nutrients and environmental impacts is not well-known. Here we assess the value of daily per capita food waste of 151 countries using two recent indicators for embedded nutrition losses (wasted nutrient days and wasted daily diets) and five indicators for environmental impacts. Globally, on average, 65 kg of food is wasted per year by one person of which 25% is through wasted vegetables, 24% through cereals and 12% through fruits. Daily wasted amounts of vitamin C, K, Zinc, Copper, Manganese and Selenium are especially high representing 25-50% of their daily dietary recommended intake (DRI) value. Cereals, fruits and vegetables are the three major food groups contributing the most to wasted nutrients followed by meat, dairy and eggs that contribute substantially to the wasted calcium, choline, riboflavin, zinc, and vitamin B12. Global average amount of food waste per capita per year contains 18 healthy diets meaning it can fulfil the DRIs of 25 nutrients for one person for 18 days. The embedded environmental footprints in average person's daily food waste are: 124 g CO2 eq., 58 Litre freshwater use, 0.36 m2 cropland use, 2.90 g nitrogen and 0.48 g phosphorus use. Cereals, meat, and sugar are major food groups contributing to environmental impacts. Our results show that different countries have widely varying nutrients and environmental footprints embedded in their food waste entailing country-specific waste reduction interventions.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet
Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S. E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E. M., Biggs, R., Carpenter, S. R., de Vries, W., de Wit, C. A., et al. (2015) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1259855 · Cited by 12,527
Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems
Willett, W., Rockström, J., Loken, B., Springmann, M., Lang, T., Vermeulen, S., Garnett, T., Tilman, D., DeClerck, F., Wood, A., et al. (2019) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(18)31788-4 · Cited by 10,880
Self-citationAbarca-Gómez, L., Abdeen, Z. A., Hamid, Z. A., Abu-Rmeileh, N. M., Acosta-Cazares, B., Acuin, C., Adams, R. J., Aekplakorn, W., Afsana, K., Aguilar-Salinas, C. A., et al. (2017) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(17)32129-3 · Cited by 7,482
Self-citationTrumbo, P., Schlicker, S., Yates, A. A., & Poos, M. (2002) · Journal of the American Dietetic Association · doi:10.1016/s0002-8223(02)90346-9 · Cited by 5,993
Afshin, A., Sur, P. J., Fay, K. A., Cornaby, L., Ferrara, G., Salama, J. S., Mullany, E. C., Abate, K. H., Abbafati, C., Abebe, Z., et al. (2019) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(19)30041-8 · Cited by 5,811
Trumbo (2001) · doi:10.1016/s0002-8223(01)00078-5 · Cited by 4,852
Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth
Estes, J. A., Terborgh, J., Brashares, J. S., Power, M. E., Berger, J., Bond, W. J., Carpenter, S. R., Essington, T. E., Holt, R. D., Jackson, J. B. C., et al. (2011) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1205106 · Cited by 4,087
Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits
Springmann, M., Clark, M., Mason-D’Croz, D., Wiebe, K., Bodirsky, B. L., Lassaletta, L., de Vries, W., Vermeulen, S. J., Herrero, M., Carlson, K. M., et al. (2018) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0594-0 · Cited by 3,380
(2011) · FAO eBooks · Cited by 3,368
The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change: The Lancet Commission report
Swinburn, B. A., Kraak, V. I., Allender, S., Atkins, V. J., Baker, P. I., Bogard, J. R., Brinsden, H., Calvillo, A., De Schutter, O., Devarajan, R., et al. (2019) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(18)32822-8 · Cited by 3,081
Cited by
Novel Approaches in the Valorization of Agricultural Wastes and Their Applications
Capanoglu, E., Nemli, E., & Tomas-Barberan, F. (2022) · Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry · doi:10.1021/acs.jafc.1c07104 · Cited by 409
Utilization of Vegetable and Fruit By-Products as Functional Ingredient and Food
Lau, K. Q., Sabran, M. R., & Shafie, S. R. (2021) · Frontiers in Nutrition · doi:10.3389/fnut.2021.661693 · Cited by 239
Wu, S., Wang, Q., Fang, M., Wu, D., Cui, D., Pan, S., Bai, J., Xu, F., & Wang, Z. (2023) · Science of The Total Environment · doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.165327 · Cited by 155
Identification of Bacteria in Two Food Waste Black Soldier Fly Larvae Rearing Residues
Gold, M., von Allmen, F., Zurbrügg, C., Zhang, J., & Mathys, A. (2020) · Frontiers in Microbiology · doi:10.3389/fmicb.2020.582867 · Cited by 109
Self-citationResource recovery of bioactive compounds from food waste and their diverse industrial applications
Chauhan, S., Pandit, N. K., Mohanty, A., & Meena, S. S. (2025) · Biomass Conversion and Biorefinery · doi:10.1007/s13399-023-04967-3 · Cited by 29
Metadata
- Authors
- Chen, C., Chaudhary, A., & Mathys, A.
- Venue
- Resources, Conservation and Recycling
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2020-09
- Volume
- 160
- Pages
- 104912
- ISSN
- 0921-3449 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3027111949
- Cited by
- 363
- References
- 85
- FWCI
- 26.09
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Nutritional and environmental losses embedded in global food waste. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.resconrec.2020.104912
- The paper
- Chen, C., Chaudhary, A., & Mathys, A. (2020). Nutritional and environmental losses embedded in global food waste. Resources, Conservation and Recycling. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2020.104912
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
