Some 40% of the food produced each year gets thrown out, mostly by consumers but also by farmers, retailers and manufacturers.
Wasting that much food is bad enough, but what makes it even worse is that when food gets tossed so does the water used to make it.
New research from the World Resource Institute estimates that 45 trillion gallons of water is wasted globally because the food it is contained within has been thrown out.
Meat and produce in particular are huge water wasters since it takes a lot of water to produce them.
But there’s an even bigger problem: Since much of today’s food is produced in one country and then shipped to another, wasted food water doesn’t go back into the ecosystem from which it came.
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