How to reduce food waste at home: separate your apples and repurpose your leftovers

About 30 to 40% of the food in the US goes uneaten each year - and individual solutions such as making a grocery list can address the problem

Priyanka Naik has been looking for creative ways to reduce food waste for as long as she can remember. A vegan chef, author and TV personality, she often turns kitchen scraps into inventive new meals and packs up restaurant leftovers - including the bread basket - to take home for later. Instead of tossing the white rice that comes with her takeout meals, which she says she's not a huge fan of", she might throw it in a food processor with beans, potatoes and spices, and shape the mixture into patties for veggie burgers.

From a climate perspective, Naik's approach makes sense. While food waste is difficult to measure, one estimate by the UN Environment Program found that if food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gasses after China and the US.