61 tons of food ends up in the trash. A shocking summary of Polish holidays

Can you imagine a mountain of food waste that weighs 61.7 tons, or as much as six Eiffel Towers in Paris? Or as much as 85 percent would fit. surface of the Royal Castle in Warsaw or in 49 Olympic swimming pools filled to the brim with such waste? Such shocking waste is a fact: 83% of people throw away so much Christmas food. Poles and only between December 23-30 – according to a study carried out by Opinia24 on behalf of Too Good To Go.

Christmas is not only a time of joy and family meetings at a lavishly set table. This is the time when we buy much more food than we can use. We freeze some of it and process it to consume later, but huge amounts end up in the trash – As much as 1.6 kg of food is thrown away per Pole. Too Good To Go research shows that six out of eight Poles will prepare too much food to meet their needs. The most common reasons for throwing away food during the holiday season were indicated by Poles as: failure to use leftovers during the preparation of dishes (33%), spoilage of products (29%), lack of freshness of products (18%), preparing too much food (12%) and lack of desire to continue eating (7%).

The whole of Poland would eat the thrown away food: fruit and vegetables are most often thrown away on holidays (10.9 thousand tons). To transport this amount of food, a train with 182 wagons would be needed. Next are soups (9.69 thousand tons) and drinks (7.7 thousand tons), which equates to about four cups per person. As many as 27 million fishburgers could be prepared from discarded fish (5.4 thousand tons), and the number of sweets and desserts (4 thousand tons) would be enough for a 5 kg basket of sweets for every resident of Krakow.

During the holiday season, we throw away the most food on December 24 – on this day, fish are the most common in waste bins. On December 25 and 26, it is mainly soups, while on December 27 – leftover drinks. Despite this, on December 30, more than half of Poles (65%) still have leftovers of Christmas dishes in the fridge.

The study was carried out by Opinia24 Opinia24 on behalf of Too Good To Go, a company working to reduce food waste, on December 23-30, 2023 on a representative group of 585 Poles aged 18-65. Respondents kept a diary every day in which they recorded the weight of the food they threw away, divided into categories, and the reasons for throwing it away.