The 17% does include what is lost in retail supply chains and consumer waste. Read the report. What is lost before it gets into the retail market might not be included. Egg shells, bones, apple cores and much more are used in the pre-consumer production markets as business in the business of processing food do not tolerate any waste they can avoid. They know waste costs. Even the "waste" from ethanol production is feed to cattle. Bones are made into bone meal. Egg shells are fed back to chickens as calcium supplements. Some of us who grow some of our own food, do compost cores and stems, supplement our soils with eggshells, bones, well, yes, I just throw them out. When I worked on a farm, potatoes that could not be sold in our primary market got sold to dairy/cattle farmers as animal food. I question a lot of the methodology of those studies you reference and some of the other statistics you cite. They appear to me to be biased and I think your tone is unnecessarily alarmist. This is a valid issue but not alarming. Kind of like click bait.

TEK