Tackling Household Food Waste
Use It Up is our ongoing campaign to tackle household food waste. Every year, 2.5 million tonnes of food is wasted from our homes. Luckily, we’ve got a solution that sticks!
Use your Use It Up Tape® to see what needs using first, and cook a Use It Up meal once a week! It’s a simple habit that will save food, save money and save the planet.
Tackling Household Food Waste
Use It Up is our ongoing campaign to tackle household food waste. Every year, 2.5 million tonnes of food is wasted from our homes. Luckily, we’ve got a solution that sticks!
Use your Use It Up Tape® to see what needs using first, and cook a Use It Up meal once a week! It’s a simple habit that will save food, save money and save the planet.
2025 Half Eaten: Household Food Waste Report
This inaugural Household Food Waste Report provides the latest snapshot of Australian household food waste behaviours, volumes, and costs. The research provides organisations, industry, and government with current insights to inform food waste reduction strategies while identifying actionable steps for individuals.
Use It Up Tape
OzHarvest’s Use It Up Tape makes it easy to fight food waste at home. The tape can be used to mark a shelf in your fridge or pantry, or on food items/containers that needs using up. It’s a visual reminder for the whole household – once you can see it, you can use it up!
Use It Up Recipes
Our research showed that using up your food, before buying more is the best way to reduce food waste at home.
Use It Up is all about making it easy for Aussies to waste less. Check out our quick and easy recipes and videos to transform commonly wasted ingredients into delicious meals. Plus, great tips and tricks from top chefs and OzHarvest supporters.
Fight Food Waste Design Competition
We threw down a challenge: design bold, eye-catching artwork for our Use It Up Tape. And wow, did students deliver! Over 450 imaginative entries flooded in, each one bursting with creativity and passion.
Our powerhouse judging panel – Ronni, Craig Reucassel and Costa Georgiadis – faced the impossible task of choosing the winners from an array of incredible talent.
The winners are absolutely brilliant! Madison from St Monica’s College and Alexandra from Plenty Parklands Primary School knocked it out of the park with designs that are playful, punchy, and instantly memorable. Their winning designs will roll out on limited-edition Use It Up Tape next year to inspire thousand more students across the country.
A solution that sticks!
Latest research from BehaviourWorks Australia shows Use It Up Tape is a simple yet powerful solution in the fight against food waste.
Halving Household Food Waste
OzHarvest teamed up with BehaviourWorks Australia (part of Monash Sustainable Development Institute) to understand what it takes to halve household food waste. This Australian-first research is detailed in the report ‘Halving Household Food Waste – Which Behaviours Matter?’
The campaign was informed by the insights from the report, inspiring citizen action to help achieve our national target of halving food waste by 2030, in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12.3.
Downloadable tools
Fight food waste at home by getting into good food saving habits. Click here for a collection of downloadable resources. Including a combined meal planner and shopping list to make sure you only buy what you need, and a fridge guide to help stack your fridge to make food last longer.
Work with us!
Are you a council, business or organisation keen to share Use It Up with your community? We’d love to chat – please get in touch at [email protected]
Ask for government action!
Our nation produces a staggering 7.6 million tonnes of food waste each year. That’s 7.6 million tonnes too much! We need change and government action. Stand with us and sign our petition today!
Tips from our Use It Up Ambassadors
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I have written more than 3000 zero-waste recipes…you could say I’m obsessed. Scrub don’t peel veggies, roast your pumpkin pips when you roast the rest, never hull strawberries or peel stuff that goes into a smoothie (all roughage is welcome!) Put all carrot, onion, zucchini ends along with celery leaves in a bag in the freezer ready for making stock.
Sarah Wilson
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As a chef, I hate the thought of any food going to waste, as a Dad I know the challenges of managing the household fridge! Spending so much time at home in lockdown means I am generally using up something every day. My Use It Up advice is you don’t always need a recipe, just experiment with your cooking – your family will tell you what works!
Colin Fassnidge
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Reducing food waste is critical for our future and easy to do at home - I clean the fridge once a week and pick recipes like my Dump and Bake Fried Rice to use up all those leftover bits of veg - plus it helps to have someone like Dozer (my dog) who never passes up a chance to eat it up!
Nagi
RecipeTin Eats
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A jazzed up version of bubble and squeak is my go-to recipe as it’s something my Dad always used to cook and you can use up most of what you have in your fridge!
Neil Perry
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My fridge is usually a disaster zone, which meant I was always buying produce I already had. I’m not proud of how much food I wasted from not knowing what was shoved at the back of the shelves. The Use It Up tape has helped me organise my fridge and now I’m wasting much less – if I can do it, anyone can!
Jessica Rowe
Supporters
