Source: treehugger.com
Published: February 7, 2013
© UNEP
It is estimated that forty to fifty percent of the food produced each year goes to waste. Thankfully, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and TreeHugger are partnering to bring attention to this problem, but we need your help! Enter our green blogging contest to help spread awareness about food waste and earn a chance to travel around the world with UNEP and TreeHugger. Details below.
World Environment Day is a global event dedicated to raising awareness about the many environmental problems and opportunities for solutions. Each year, UNEP identifies a theme and for 2013, the theme is food waste: Think * Eat * Save.
For the past three years, TreeHugger has partnered with UNEP to host an essay contest and send the winning writers to join TreeHugger and UNEP in covering the World Environment Day festivities around the world. In the past, they have traveled to Kenya, India and Brazil. WED is an inspiring event that includes participants from around the world and traveling with UNEP is truly an experience of a lifetime.
The contest is now open to submissions! For a chance to win a trip with UNEP & TreeHugger, you’ll be writing two blog posts or essays about food waste. Our Judging panel and the public will vote on the best entries and a winner will be selected. Start thinking about what you want to write about now! To get you started, here’s a bit of information from UNEP on why this theme is so important and how your involvement in the contest will help:
The task is to call for heightened awareness and immediate action to reduce food waste and loss across the food supply chain. There is so much to blog about! Just consider some of these facts:
- The total quantity of wasted food around the globe, 300 million tonnes, is more than the total net food production of Sub-Saharan Africa–enough to feed the estimated 900 million people hungry in the world.
- Worldwide, one in every seven people go to bed hungry and more than 20,000 people die of hunger every day.
- Australians throw out more than 4 million tonnes of food every year: close to a thousand kilograms per household.
- Getting food from farm to fork in the US eats up 10% of the total energy budget, uses 50% of its land and swallows 80% of all fresh water consumed in the US. The equivalent of $165 billion each year.
- Uneaten food ends up rotting in landfills as the single largest component of US solid waste where it accounts for almost 25% of methane emissions.
Or you can blog about your own food consumption discovery – what and how much are you wasting? Will you commit to reduce your foodprint? How will you inspire others to do the same?
Here’s How to Enter
For official contest rules, submission instructions, frequently asked questions and other resources, visit the World Environment Day Blogging Contest site.
The deadline to enter is February 28th, but you can submit your entries now. Don’t wait till the deadline!
Good luck on your entries and we look forward to reading them!