Families on Tyneside are binning up to a third of the food they buy every year.
Dairy products that have gone off, decomposing fruit and mouldy bread all go into the bin and are sent off to landfill where they rot away, giving off toxic methane gas.
What is more, lazy shoppers driving their cars to supermarkets instead of walking to the corner shop are pumping tonnes of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the air every year.
Environmental experts say it is time for families to think about how much they waste just doing their weekly shop.
A report by WRAP, the Waste & Resources Action Programme, shows unwanted food accounts for almost a fifth of waste from the home and 67 million tonnes are tipped into landfill sites every year.
But experts say most of this could be composted and fed back into our gardens, and a half is still fit to eat when it is thrown out.
Jennie Price, chief executive of WRAP, said: "Our research has found that about half of the food we throw away could have been eaten.
"There is a real opportunity here for us to both save some money and help the environment by making a few small changes.
"The striking point which emerges from the research is that only 10% of those asked realised they were throwing so much food away."
Liz Crocker, from Newcastle-based Little Wasters, said: "If you have food that is left over, think about making other meals with it.
"If you still have food that you can't use it's worth thinking about using a composter or a wormery.
"People can take control of the amount of food waste and packaging that they produce. It's easy."
Councils around the region offer kerbside pick-ups for garden waste, which is composted.
And they also offer discounted home compost bins through the WRAP scheme.
In the week in which the Government set a target of reducing CO? emissions in the UK by 60% by 2050, research by supermarket firm Somerfield shows "shopping miles", families using cars to do food shopping, pump out as much CO2 as half a million transatlantic flights.
But only a fifth of people in the North East think this is a problem.
Although 67% of us have a grocer's within walking-distance of our homes, one in five of us are more likely to hop in the car for a trip to an out-of-town shop.
And only 43% of people in the North East say they would walk to the supermarket.
Pete Williams, of Somerfield, said: "Increasingly, the British public are hunting for new ways to be environmentally-friendly, from cutting international holidays to planting trees to producing their own compost, yet many of these people completely ignore the obvious, such as cutting the usage of their cars.
"Even reducing these seemingly trivial journeys could have an incredible effect."