🗑️ Food Waste Calculator
Put a number on what you throw away. Enter your weekly food waste and see the annual weight, cost, and carbon footprint — plus what you'd save by cutting it.
📉 Measure your waste
🗑️ Your annual food waste
That greenhouse-gas footprint is roughly the same as driving 650 miles in an average car.
💚 If you cut waste by 50%
Estimate only. Uses a documented factor of 2.5kg CO₂e per kg of food waste — a mid-range lifecycle figure from WRAP and the FAO's Food Wastage Footprint (published estimates span roughly 1.9–4.5 kg CO₂e/kg depending on the food mix and disposal method). Your real figures will vary.
What is a Food Waste Calculator?
It converts the food you throw away into three numbers that are easy to act on: how much you waste in a year by weight, what it costs you, and the greenhouse-gas emissions behind it. Food waste is one of the largest — and most fixable — sources of household emissions, because every wasted item carries the carbon of growing, processing, and transporting food that never gets eaten.
Enter your weekly waste by weight, dollar value, or both, then set a reduction target to see the payoff. A household wasting a few kilograms a week is often looking at over a hundred kilograms of food, hundreds of dollars, and hundreds of kilograms of CO₂e every year. Seeing those figures side by side is a powerful nudge toward planning meals, storing food well, and using up what you buy.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
How much food does a typical household waste?
Studies from WRAP and the USDA suggest the average household throws away a substantial share of the food it buys — often cited as around a quarter to a third by value. Even a couple of kilograms a week adds up to over a hundred kilograms and hundreds of dollars a year, which is exactly what this calculator makes visible.
Where does the CO₂e figure come from?
The tool multiplies your annual wasted weight by 2.5 kg of CO₂-equivalent per kilogram of food waste. That is a mid-range lifecycle figure drawn from WRAP and the FAO's Food Wastage Footprint work; published estimates span roughly 1.9 to 4.5 kg CO₂e per kg depending on the mix of foods and whether landfill methane is included. It captures the emissions embedded in growing, processing, and transporting food that then goes uneaten.
Why does wasted food have such a large carbon footprint?
Every item of food carries the emissions of everything it took to produce and move it — farming, fertiliser, processing, refrigeration, and transport. When it rots in landfill it also releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas. So throwing food away wastes all of that upstream effort on top of the disposal impact, which is why food waste is such a high-leverage climate action.
What's a realistic reduction target?
Many households can cut avoidable food waste by half through simple habits: planning meals, shopping to a list, storing food properly, and using up leftovers. The calculator lets you set any percentage so you can see what a modest 25% cut saves versus a more ambitious goal — both in dollars and in emissions.
Are these numbers exact?
No — they're estimates to help you understand scale and motivate change. The weight and cost you enter are your own figures, and the CO₂e factor is an average across many food types. Your real footprint depends on what specifically you waste (meat and dairy carry far higher emissions than bread or vegetables).