On the occasion of World Environment Day, UNRIC and the Nordic Council of Ministers launched a Nordic-Baltic Ad Competition to support the fight against food waste.

The Ad Competition calls on designers to create an advertisement to increase public awareness of the increasing scale of food waste in our modern day society and to draw attention to the problem of increasing food waste.

Website - http://thinkeatsave.strutta.com/

This summer, the UN is calling on creative people in the five Nordic countries, the Baltic states and North-Western Russia to create an ad to raise awareness on the need to stop food waste.

Europe has been hit hard by the financial crisis and many are struggling to make ends meet. But still, over 30% of our food goes to waste. 300 million tonnes of food that is fit for consumption is discarded every year in developed countries, an amount that could feed an estimated 900 million hungry people in the world.

Naturally, it is not a question of shipping leftovers to the hungry. However, our excessive demand for food – of which a third ends up in the bin – drives up global food prices at the detriment of the world?s poor. Yet with relative ease and a few simple changes to our habits, we can bring an end to the high levels of global food waste. The first step is to make people aware that they can stop wasting food, get more for their money and at the same time contribute to a better world.

This year, the World Environment Day on June 5th was devoted to stopping food waste. On this day, the UN Regional Information Centre for Western-Europe (UNRIC) launched an ad/poster competition on food waste: the Think.Eat.Save. - Nordic-Baltic Ad Competition. The first prize is the Nordic Council of Ministers Award and a 5,000 ? cash prize, which will be handed over to the winner at an event in Copenhagen on October 4th, 2013. A jury of experts will choose the overall winner of the competition and there will also be a prize determined by public votes on the competition website.

The competition is a collaboration between UNRIC in Brussels and the Nordic Council of Ministers in support of the Think.Eat.Save. Reduce your foodprint-campaign of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). Among our partners are the Stop Wasting Food Movement in Denmark and UK-based Feeding the 5,000.

The winning ad will be published in newspapers and websites in the region, displayed in exhibits in all of the participating countries and used in the Think.Eat.Save. Reduce your foodprint-campaign worldwide.