As an ambassador representing South Korea, please understand that this article was written mainly in Korea.

Something happened that my ancestors could laugh at if hearing it. 21-century humans start to throw away food. With unprecedented peace of the world-not whole- and the development of science, people who die for starving had diminished. As a result, the proportion of food waste inversely increased. 

Below picture is a graph of South Korea's generated waste types.  

Even though the highest proportion is the 'Etc' section, it includes a variety of types of waste like plastics, aluminum, or vinyl. Therefore the most generated waste is factually the food waste. Most people are likely to think that cooking as many as I can eat is the point. But it's not. 57% of food waste occurs before eating. In the process of distribution and cooking, the most amount of food(57%) is wasting. 

There is another thing to need to know. 70% of the food waste comes from home and small restaurants. So if making a result, minimizing food waste in the process of making home-cooked meals is the best way to maximize the effect.

Korea has heavy work to decrease food waste. If converting food waste to the value of food resources, it causes a loss of 20 trillion won yearly. And it costs 800 million won in only disposing. In an environmentally friendly calculation, 8.85 million tons of CO2 have generated annually by the waste. This figure is the same as 50 round-trip emissions of passenger cars or 1,500 pine trees absorbed.

Food waste has the only negative influence on all kinds of sectors, which include economic or environmental. I have said that raising awareness of the public is the most important since the March articles. Of course, the environment is worthier than money. But Koreans, who are living in capitalism and materialism, are prone to get tempted at economic more. The environmental changes are out of sight because it changes so slowly. On the economic side, however, people always live with spending money. They pay the taxes regularly to the government. Tax is one of the direct parts of their income. And they want it to be useful. Naturally, people are sensitive to money. To put it another way, people have more empathy on the economic side than the environmental one. Hence, I think it's time to use a trick. By putting economic factors at the forefront, the government should achieve its goal of environmental preservation, Like this. 

"Wasting food thoughtlessly leads to a loss of 20 trillion won. By the way, we can save 5 trillion won in taxes as well as 160 million won in disposal by only reducing 20% of the waste." It's a lot more efficient than explaining how much CO2 is discharging or what thousands of pine tree's effects are.

Today, I talked about food waste's economic and environmental calculations and equivalent values of it. Moreover, what the government should do to improve the situation. I hope you to enjoy this.