Verdict in Vienna Man rescues food from garbage and goes to prison
Supermarket bins often contain food that is still edible. A man from Vienna has been sentenced for helping himself to this food.
No time? blue News summarizes for you
- A man has been convicted of theft in Vienna.
- He is accused of taking food from supermarket garbage cans without permission.
- The environmental organization Greenpeace criticizes the verdict and argues that rescuing food should not be a crime.
A man took food from garbage cans in Vienna and ate it with his girlfriend. The food was still in its original packaging. This called the law into action: the man was charged with theft, as reported by the "Kronen Zeitung" newspaper.
According to the report, the man had walked through the unlocked door onto a supermarket premises and rummaged through the garbage. A court deemed this to constitute theft and sentenced him to prison. The accused could spend four weeks behind bars. The verdict is not yet final.
However, the court's legal opinion has been criticized: The environmental protection organization Greenpeace reports: "Saving food that would have been destroyed in a waste incineration plant anyway cannot and should not be a crime." In Austria, 26 kilograms of food are thrown into garbage cans every second. That's 830,000 tons per year.
Much of it is incinerated. According to Greenpeace, food worth 1.4 billion euros is lost in this way every year - simply because it is past its best-before date.