Publicity About UK’s Huge Food Waste Mountain Should Encourage Uptake of Anaerobic Digestion Projects
The British nation is appallingly wasteful of their food. The UK government has launched a plea for a return to the thrifty approach of previous generations by buying less and eating leftover food. However, all need not be lost. Anaerobic Digestion plants can use this premium form of waste as a feedstock and most will operate much more efficiently.
The fact is that if the UK is to play its part in averting climate change the extent of this waste will have to be curbed, shoppers were warned yesterday.
The call for a "cultural" move against overshopping was made by Joan Ruddock (on 1 November 2007), the Environment minister, after research showed Britons threw away one third of their food, at an enormous hidden financial and environmental cost.
Each household jettisons between £250 and £400 worth of food each year, according to the new figures. Each year, the UK dumps 6.7 million tonnes, of food. Furthermore, most of the waste - which nationally costs £8bn to treat or dispose of – is sent to landfill where it rots, potentially emitting the potent climate-change gas methane.
The public must realise that while they are scraping food into the bin they are directly fuelling climate change. Waste food now presents a bigger environmental problem than packaging.
"We cannot fail to do what is necessary”, Ms Ruddock, the minister for climate change 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 that 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.
Wrap's estimate of waste was compiled after polling almost 3,000 households and getting 300 people to keep diaries of what food they threw away. Although 90 per cent of people thought they threw away little, the true picture was revealed by these research diaries.
Most waste arose because people had "over-shopped" for a variety of reasons.
The Anaerobic Digestion Community would do well not to waste any time, nor stint on expense to publicise how well AD can treat all this wasted food waste, which, with it’s high calorific value could be producing large amounts of renewable energy.
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