How can Hongkongers reduce city’s food waste mountain? Revive, reuse and repurpose the produce you buy

To eat more healthily and cut down on the growing problem of food waste, take a second look at the goods you are about to toss in the bin. You may be able to repurpose them into delicious, nutritious, safe-to-eat dishes.

A 2012 Environmental Protection Department study showed nearly 9,300 tonnes of municipal solid waste was disposed of in the city’s three landfills every day. Food waste was the largest component, accounting for 36 per cent of the total – 3,348 tonnes.

When we discard food, we are also discarding many healthy nutrients, some of which we lack in our average daily diet. According to Marie Spiker, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US state of Maryland, the most perishable foods and foods that we are most likely to toss out – fruits, vegetables, and seafood – are also some of the most nutritious.

Using US Department of Agriculture data, Spiker and her colleagues calculated the nutritional value of foods in 213 categories that were wasted during 2012, both at the retail level and in homes.

They broke it down to show that per person, per day, nationwide wasted food contained an estimated 1,250 to 1,400 calories, as well as 146 grams of carbohydrates, 33 grams of protein, 6 grams of fibre, 286 milligrams of calcium, 2mg of vitamin D and 900mg of potassium, among other nutrients.