Britons Waste $20bn Worth of Food a Year
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA on 05. 9.08
We’ve already heard lots about the food crisis that is threatening global development, and we have had plenty of debate about how eating no meat, a little meat, fake meat and even the plain old potato might help ease global hunger, stop global warming, and generally make life easier for all of us. But let’s forget about what we do eat for a moment – a new report coming out of the UK shows the staggering costs of what we don’t eat:
“About £6bn of the wasted annual food budget is food that is bought but never touched - including 13m unopened yoghurt pots, 5,500 chickens and 440,000 ready meals dumped in home rubbish bins each day. The rest is food prepared or cooked for meals but never eaten because people have misjudged how much was needed and don't eat the leftovers.
The complete £10bn consists of food that could have been eaten, not including peeling and bones, the researchers say. Tackling the waste could mean a huge reduction in CO2 emissions, equivalent to taking one in five cars off the road. The figures have been compiled by Wrap, the waste and resources action programme, which previously made the £8bn estimate and has warned we are throwing away a third of the food we buy, enough to fill Wembley stadium with food waste eight times over in a year.
It’s time to start thinking seriously about municipal composting programs like those in Mexico, Seattle and San Francisco, and on an individual level we can all take responsibility by biting off only what we can chew - check out some of the helpful tips on everything from portion sizing to storage to using left overs at Love Food Hate Waste, the campaign that comissioned the original report.
::Love Food Hate Waste::via The Guardian::
Have you actually consumed food in England before? If you have, you won't be surprised that so much of it gets wasted.
Yes, it's amazing how we waste our resources for no use at all. We need to start fixing our own problems.
Cheshire County Council offers very low cost (£8 with free shipping) 220 litre compost bins online and various accessories at very low cost.
They also have a "brown bin" scheme where you can pay £23/year for a wheelie bin the same size as the rubbish and recycling bins used for kerbside collection. This brown bin is for garden waste, but I assume that you can put other compostable items in there too. Every two weeks the council comes to collect it. Apparently they then shred it and take it to local compost farms where it is then used on local farmland.
According to the council website, about 40% of residents in the borough partake in the brown bin scheme. And many of my neighbours have their own compost bins too.
So, luckily there are some areas of Britain that are working on reducing food waste.
lol you spelled Britains* wrong.
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Author's comment:
Thanks for pointing it out - consistency is important to us - but I believe it is actually the correct spelling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britons
I am all in favour of composting but let's play out the municipal response a few years into the future.
Cities invest enormous amounts of money into rolling bins and more trucks to dump them. High labour costs for more staff.
Oil continues to rise in price, after all, they aren't making any more so it just gets more scarce and more expensive. This makes the cost of running waste trucks more expensive.
Millions of people are labouring to stay on top of mortgages that stretched them greatly. The economy is slowing, in part due to the mortgage meltdown, and this makes it even harder to pay mortgages. This means that nobody is in favour of increasing tax rates to pay for the higher costs of fuel to run municipal services.
Eventually, cities just cancel the program and tell people to compost at home. Gee, shouldn't we have just started there in the first place? Instead we wasted all the money on rolling carts and trucks when it could have gone to backyard bins and other devices.
TreeHugger has reported on everything needed to create a multi-scale composting system: backyard composters, balcony worm bins, industrial worm bins for apartment parkades, crazy swedish devices that suck the water out of compost, and methane biodigesters that generate electricity while composting at the neighbourhood scale. I would add on social enterprise where dumpster divers are re-trained as compost technicians and paid to turn and amend backyard compost piles.
Picking stuff up in trucks is NOT sustainable.