Independent UK: Britain's colossal food waste is stoking climate change

Britain's colossal food waste is stoking climate change
By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Published: 02 November 2007


Britons must swap their wasteful habits with food for the thrifty approach of previous generations by buying less and eating leftovers if the UK is to play its part in averting climate change, shoppers were warned yesterday.

The call for a "cultural" move against overshopping was made by Joan Ruddock, the Environment minister, after research showed Britons threw away one third of their food, at an enormous hidden financial and environmental cost.

Annually, the UK dumps 6.7 million tonnes, meaning each household jettisons between £250 and £400 worth of food each year. Most of the waste – which nationally costs £8bn – is sent to landfill where it rots, emitting the potent climate- change gas methane.

Ms Ruddock, the minister for climate change, warned that, although many people had not made the connection between scraping food into the bin and climate change, waste food presented a bigger environmental problem than packaging. "We cannot fail to do what is necessary," she said.

"At this rate we will not have a place to live which is habitable if we don't address climate change globally and the UK has to make its contribution."

The Waste & Resources Action Programme (Wrap), a government-funded agency that has been investigating food waste, complained consumers were, in effect, dumping one in three bags of shopping straight in the bin. Preventing that waste would have the same environmental impact as taking one in five cars off the roads, said Wrap's chief executive, Liz Goodwin.

In an attempt to change attitudes, Wrap has devised a campaign "Love Food Hate Waste", launched at Borough Market in London yesterday by Ms Ruddock and the TV chefs Ainsley Harriott and Paul Merrett. A slew of prominent chefs including Tom Aikens and Mark Hix, the former cricketer David Gower and the actress Prunella Scales are backing an advertising blitz that encourages people to plan their shopping, use food before it goes off and make meals from leftovers.

Appearing on the campaign's video, the Hell's Kitchen chef Marco Pierre White recalled that his mother used to make bubble and squeak out of leftovers and called for people to return to more careful ways. "There's a use for everything. We should show a little more respect for Mother Nature," he said. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article3121163.ece

Brings to mind when I was doing KP two-plus decades ago in Basic Training.

The evening meal was over and so was the cleanup. It was almost time to go back to the barracks and sack out, exhausted from a day of hot steam and hard work (we washed dishes and the like, the food was prepared by civilian contractors).

Before I left, one of the civvies asked me if I wanted to volunteer for another job. What the hell, I did.

The guy took me back to a huge walk-in fridge and said, "Everything in this fridge is expired, dump it out."

I was in a bit of a shock, being young and never fully understanding just how much massive amount of all kinds of waste is created by our lifestyle. BUt THIS was even worse. A giant fridge full of food that was being dumped...all of it.

So I began stripping plastic off those big metal square standardized "cafetria" toureens and dumping their contents (which all smelled fully fresh and fine, I check a few of them out of curiosity, and at the end when it was all dumped, there was no rotting smell, not even the tiniest whiff, coming from what I'd dumped).

I had been given a 55-gallon Rubbermaid empty trashcan to put the wasted food in, and not only did I fill that one up, I almost filled another.

And that was more than 20 years ago, hen America was still a free nation and a sane nation.

Now, as we are corrupt, un-free, and insane as a nation, I wonder how much more food we waste.

but one of the more sobering things I've ever seen was a dumpster full of dead turkeys from a turkey farm.

All those turkeys just going to waste. :(

I think, for at the very least a majority of Americans and possibly most American generate many extra tons of waste and CO2 in our work lives as in our personal lives.

In my work life, as a molecular biologist, the amount of plastic I throw away every day is simply staggering (plates, plastic pipette tips, plastic bottles, packaging, and a host of other disposable plastic items daily). That is the way it's done, and there may be a better, more environmentally-friendly way to do the research (when you are dealing with small molecules or even small organisms, the tiniest amount of contamination throws an experiment off, usually making it necessary to redo, wasting the same amount of plastic again), but no is looking, I think. Even in the scientific community.

My point is, we pollute much more making all the crap we own and use than we do using it at home.

waste as the certainly must be now. I was in charge of keeping the lab clean and orderly, which involved a lot of washing of lab glassware by hand (and autoclaving in salt water to remove Ag residues) and soaking glass pipettes and automated rinsers and such. The only plastic I really recall was the petri plates, of course.

I bet all the "glassware" is disposable plastics now......