We have a fridge for employees at every floor that gets completely emptied and cleaned once a year (between Christmas and the new year). The rest of the year, it is the employees' job to keep the fridge clean and usable - that is, up to the individual.

While I would never touch a coworkers' food to eat it, I wondered if it is acceptable to throw away food from those shared fridges that has obviously gone bad (e.g. moldy). As food theft (luckily) isn't an issue, none of the things are labeled, so asking a specific person to throw out their food themselves is not an option. And personally I am also not a big fan of passive-aggressive notes on the fridge door addressing the general public to please keep the fridge cleaner and to get rid of spoilt stuff.

With a lot of people working from home much more than before and people being in quarantine for weeks at a time, having food that has gone bad in the fridge is happening more often (because I guess people are bad planners or simply forgot that they still have food and on return a couple of days later it already has gone bad).

So the question is: is it OK to throw out spoilt food or do I just have to live with the moldy stuff and wait until the owners do it themselves?