Tony Bacic | From New Year's Day to Australia, January is our most wasteful month

For those lucky enough the season represents a time of excess, where the table is laden with chicken, sandwiches, salads and bread rolls.

This isn't a call to action for everyone to pull back on their holiday feasting but perhaps to remind us that we need, as a country and a community, to look at waste differently.

Globally the world wastes 30 per cent of what it produces, both in developing countries (where the waste is largely during the production, harvest and transport to market i.e. pre-farm gate) and in developed countries (where the waste happens after the produce has left the farm gate, i.e. post-farm gate).

In places, like Australia, we need to reimagine the supply chain that goes from the farmer to the wholesaler and the food processing industry on to the shop and the consumer.

This can be as simple as customers not expecting and demanding that all fruit look perfect.

Imperfect fruit and vegetables get thrown out on looks alone. Apart from the wastage, and what seems like clear discrimination against an ugly tomato, the amount of energy we put into making sure that all the tomatoes are gorgeous is pointless. From saving the less-than-perfect fruit to reducing landfill, Australia can do better.

Recently Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark were named the top three countries in the world at recovering their waste. And it's not only waste minimisation we are talking about but waste recovery such as recycling and composting.

Astoundingly, Switzerland has 100 per cent waste recovery, despite being in the top five for waste production (only behind Netherlands, Denmark and the USA).

Switzerland stopped burying rubbish in landfills in 2000, and now it recovers 53 per cent of its waste through material recovery, while the other 47 per cent is incinerated for energy.

This is what is called the circular economy, where we put value on companies that utilise all their waste streams and penalise those who don't.

While almost all of the tiers of government are addressing this issue to some degree there must be greater coordination and there has to be a greater commitment to food waste minimisation.

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In Europe, there is both a carrot and stick approach to encouraging farmers, retail and consumers to waste less food, and to get rid of what waste there is in an energy minimal way.

Europeans are also more aware, I think, than we are of the value of what it costs to produce a sausage or an apple. Here it's still OK to pay more for a bottle of water than a bottle of milk despite the clear and obvious differences in the cost of production of both.

With a growing population there will be a need for 70 per cent more calories, i.e. food, as soon as 2050, the responsibility to minimise waste is on all of us so this Christmas, think about the effort that went into that bowl of cherries and that ham.

And next year remember that the ugly tomato and the less appetising carrot needs a home, too.