LocationsEver wonder where the quest for a cleaner city should begin? Ideally - long before waste reaches the street. With what we buy, eat, leave on our plates, and the systems that shape our choices along the way.
From Clean Plates to Clean Cities: What Young People are Telling us About Food Waste
September 16, 2026
Farming communities are at the heart of sustainable food systems, shaping what we eat and how we build a more resilient future
More than one billion meals are wasted globally every day. Food waste isn’t just a household or restaurant problem; its impact stretches from markets and supply chains to landfills and the climate.
This is the idea behind this year’s World Cleanup Day theme - ‘From Clean Plates to Clean Cities’ that aims to draw attention to food waste – one of the largest and most preventable waste streams.The question isn’t only how we can clean up waste, but how we prevent it from being created in the first place. We cannot limit tackling food waste to asking people to make better choices. We must understand what shapes their decisions and how we can make responsible consumption easier, more affordable, and accessible.
For UNDP, this journey begins by listening to young people not only as consumers, but as entrepreneurs, community leaders and changemakers already imagining different ways of sustainable production and consumption.
Young people are ready to make better choices. But can they?
With Youth Ki Awaaz, UNDP conducted a survey of over 10,000 young people (ChoiceParCharcha) to explore what responsible consumption means to them and how it influences their everyday choices. The findings challenge the idea that young people do not have enough information on sustainability. In fact, nearly half of respondents already assess the impact their purchasing decisions have on communities. It is everyday realities that collide with good intentions.
Imagine standing in a grocery aisle, comparing an organic food product with a cheaper alternative that may have been produced using pesticides. What would you choose? For 47% of young people, that price gap is exactly where the intent to act stalls. Cost emerged as the single biggest barrier to buying sustainably, and when money isn’t a concern, confusion often is. Young people ascribe real value to credibility, with nearly a quarter unconvinced by traditional labels.
There’s a silver lining, though: only 4% had never given sustainable consumption a thought.
The problem, then, is not a lack of awareness. The gap lies between wanting to make a better choice and having realistic alternatives to choose from. A consumer may try to waste less at home but have little control over what restaurants discard, or they may want to choose locally sourced produce but have no way to verify its origins. Responsible consumption cannot rest on individual behaviour alone. It needs systems that make responsible choices possible, and young people are not waiting for those systems to emerge. They are helping build them.
From changing choices to changing systems
This is where UNDP’s youth entrepreneurship work comes in. Youth Co:Lab, co-led by UNDP India and Citi Foundation in partnership with Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog, enabled young entrepreneurs developing solutions to some of the most pressing sustainability challenges access mentorship, seed funding, networks and ecosystem connections to turn ideas into scalable solutions.
Take Greenpod Labs, founded by Deepak Rajmohan, for example. His starting point was a question that went beyond the food waste consumers immediately see around them: what about the food that never makes it to our plate?
With a background in agricultural engineering and food science, Deepak turned his attention to the enormous quantities of fruits and vegetables lost between farms and markets. Through his venture, Deepak created a shelf-life extension solution to keep produce, including bananas and citrus, fresh for longer during transit and storage.
“Couple of years ago I saw some statistics that really blew my mind. India is the second largest producer of fruits and vegetables but still about 40% of fresh produce is lost before it reaches the consumer and that is costing the country about 12 billion dollars. It contributes to about 64 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. This is such a massive problem, and I wanted to solve it. So, I decided to quit my job in the USA and move back to India and started Greenpod Labs in 2019. At Greenpod Labs, we focus on developing biotechnology based active packaging which can extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables during long distance transport and minimize food wastage and food losses.” - Deepak Rajmohan, Founder CEO of Greenpod Labs
It’s a different way of thinking about cleanup: instead of dealing with waste after it has been created, the solution works upstream, helping prevent food from becoming waste in the first place.
Youth Co:Lab connected Deepak with mentors and provided a seed grant, helping him secure an additional grant from the CVC Foundation. His journey shows how an enabling ecosystem can connect innovators to the right support and markets, helping them grow ideas into lasting impact.
Because young people aren’t just demanding better choices – they’re building the solutions that create them.
Change can also begin with a conversation
Not every solution starts in a laboratory or a start-up. Sometimes, it begins with a simple conversation around the table.
In Jorhat, Assam, sustainability champions Jonky Borah and Shyam Sundar Bordoloi are encouraging communities to think differently about food through initiatives such as Foodprints and Left on Plate. Their work focuses on reducing food waste, making more mindful choices and looking beyond the plate to the wider food system. Through conversations with school students and local farmers, they are building awareness around sustainable and indigenous food practices, while community activities such as nukkad nataks are helping spark wider conversations about how our everyday food choices are connected to the farmers, workers, markets and environment that make our food systems possible.
Jonky Borah & Shyam Sundar Bordoloi at work
While these may seem like small interventions, they point to a larger idea: sustainable consumption does not always require dramatic transformation. Sometimes, it starts by creating space to pause, rethink everyday choices and make different ones.
Young people are working across the food system
From tackling post-harvest losses to changing how communities think about food, each of these changemakers addresses a different point along the food system.
Greenpod Labs works upstream, reducing food loss before produce reaches the market whereas Foodprints and Left on Plate work at the community level, reshaping how people value food. And ChoiceParCharcha shows us what young people value, what holds them back, and what could make responsible choices easier.
Together, these stories point to a simple truth: young people do not need to be convinced that sustainability matters. They need an enabling ecosystem – one that gives them the support to build viable solutions and make sustainable choices easier. This is where UNDP’s youth work is making a difference: by listening to young people, supporting their ideas, and strengthening ecosystems that have the potential to turn individual action into wider systems change.
A cleaner city starts before the bin
World Cleanup Day traditionally evokes images of people cleaning streets, neighbourhoods and public spaces. But a cleaner city starts long before waste reaches the bin - with the choices we make, the systems that shape them, and the solutions that help prevent waste in the first place. Young people are already driving this change as consumers, entrepreneurs, community leaders and changemakers.
From clean plates to clean cities, the work begins long before the cleanup does.