In July Milan, Italy opened the Gallaratese hub, this 400 sqm owned by the city seems to be a normal supermarket, except that all the food on the shelves has been donated by supermarkets and the people shopping there don't pay anything. The hub is the third of its kind in the Italian city, each of the hubs recovers about 130 metric tons of food per year equivalent to 260,000 meals. Thanks to them, according to Politecnico, 497 metric tons of CO2 are avoided in the production and then disposal of food losses per year. What's great is that the food collected is available for the people living in the same neighbourhood creating a local aid network and avoiding transports emissions and waste. "If you recover food in one place, and you have charity some 30km away, you need to transport, store and refrigerate it, which will cost more than the food is even worth. To be sustainable, you need to act at a local level. It’s a model of proximity," says Andrea Segrè, a professor of agricultural policy at the University of Bologna. In 2021, Milan’s food waste hubs won an award in the inaugural Earthshot Prize, in the Build a Waste-free World category, with the goal to scale this model to other cities. Milan has been working for years with food waste and food policy in 2015 it launched a major Food Policy and has the goal to half food waste by 2030, working with schools and city-wide food waste collection. https://www.milanurbanfoodpolicypact.org/ https://foodpolicymilano.org/en/food-waste-hubs/ https://www.c40knowledgehub.org/s/article/In-Conversation-Giuseppe-Sala-on-Milan-s-approach-to-food-waste