Love Food - Cut Waste!

Women get together to cut food waste by half

A pilot initiative between Love Food Hate Waste and the National Federation of Women’s Institutes has helped homes to cut the food they throw away by half, and make big savings on their food bills.

The partnership organisations set up the Love Food Champions project to enable groups across the country to exchange advice and ideas on making the most of their food, and to see if they could waste less.  WI members volunteered to be ‘Champions’, recruiting and then running groups for local non-WI residents in their own communities.
 
Before the project the group participants were throwing away 4.7kg of food per week – just slightly less than the National average - but after the project, they were wasting less than half this amount per household.  The groups not only managed to cut back on the food they were throwing out, but also learned new skills on food management and cooking.

Key facts from the Love Food Hate Waste campaign:

• In the UK we are throwing away one third of the food we buy. That’s like one in three bagfuls of food shopping going straight in the bin.
• We throw away 6.7 million tonnes of food each year in the UK, when most of this food could have been eaten. (It’s not just peelings and bones – it’s good food).That’s equivalent to filling Wembley Stadium with food waste 8 times over!
• In terms of environmental impact – producing, storing and getting the food to our homes uses a lot of energy. If we stopped wasting all this food, it would save the equivalent of at least 18 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.  That’s like taking 1 in 5 cars off UK roads.
• Most of this food reaches landfill sites where it emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
• High economic cost – at least £10 billion worth of food that could have been eaten is thrown out every year. UK householders are throwing out on average more than £400/year.
• We throw food out for two main reasons: 1) we cook or prepare too much, costing us around £4 billion per year; 2) and we let food go off, either completely untouched, or opened/ started but not finished, costing £6 billion per year.

Useful links:

Love Food Hate Waste Website

WI Love Food Champions Project

WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme)