No Time to Waste
Listen to our podcast with SolPods Studio here: Food Waste: What Companies and Individuals Can Do for a More Sustainable Food System.
Easter is just around the corner and, for many, the long weekend is a time to celebrate with family and indulge in a big lunch and lots of chocolate Easter eggs.
In the UK alone, we buy around 80 million Easter eggs every year – so many that if you laid them all out in a line it would stretch the entire length of The Great Wall of China! And yet, around 8 million of these eggs are thrown away each year, along with 8 million hot cross buns, 5 million slices of leftover roast meat, 19 million leftover potatoes, and 20 million leftover portions of vegetables.
All this delicious food could be enjoyed by the millions of people in the UK who regularly experience hunger but instead, it all goes to waste. What’s more, the average price of an Easter egg is £5.72 – so that’s a lot of money wasted, too.
There’s also a huge environmental cost: these food scraps will most likely end up in landfill, where they will start breaking down and generating methane, and thereby contribute to global warming. But it’s not only the emissions from the rotting food that are a problem – when we waste food, we waste all the energy and resources (and the associated emissions) that have gone into producing, processing, transporting, and cooking it. And let’s not forget the packaging.
Greenhouse emissions across the food supply chain (based on a graphic from: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local)
About one third of all food produced for human consumption globally is lost or wasted and, as a result, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that global food loss and waste contributes 8-10% of total manmade greenhouse gas emissions (and costs about $1 trillion per year).
Food loss is defined as the reduction of edible food during production, postharvest, and processing, whereas food discarded by consumers is considered as food waste (IPCC).
We need to change our mindsets.
People are slowly beginning to talk about transforming food systems as a solution to the climate crisis. There was an increased focus on food at COP28 last year: a declaration on sustainable agriculture was signed by over 130 countries and FAO released the first part of a roadmap, outlining a global vision for agrifood systems transformation (the roadmap includes a target to reduce per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels by 2030). But with only 4 percent of total climate financing currently being directing towards the food sector, we still have a long way to go.
Start here.
Join the conversation by listening back to my chat with Amy Farrell at SolPods about my experience reducing food waste, both in my day-to-day life at home and in my previous roles at The Felix Project and at Tesco. You can listen to the SolPods Studio episode here: Food Waste: What Companies and Individuals Can Do for a More Sustainable Food System.
SolPods is a place for sustainability enthusiasts, professionals and students to connect and share practical ideas, knowledge and top tips for reducing our impact – you can join the community from anywhere in the world: https://www.solpods.earth/
For those looking to have an impact in London, the Felix Project is a London-based food redistribution charity, tackling food waste and hunger. Find out more about volunteering with them here: https://thefelixproject.org/help-us/volunteer-london
Companies can also join the fight against food waste by taking the Coolfood Pledge or through labeling Coolfood Meals on your menu. Learn more here: https://www.wri.org/initiatives/cool-food-pledge
Listen to the podcast for more ideas on how you can reduce your food waste.
And thank you to businesswaste.co.uk for the above food waste statistics.