Speech by Joan Ruddock MP to the launch of the Waste & Resources Action Programme's (WRAP) The Food We Waste report, London — Thursday 8 May 2008
I’m absolutely delighted to be here this morning, to help launch WRAP’s ‘The Food We Waste’ report.
As Ray’s [Georgeson, Director of Policy and Evaluation at WRAP] presentation has so ably demonstrated, WRAP’s study of household food waste, which led up to this report, has been truly groundbreaking – both in terms of scale, and indeed of the results it has produced. Ray, as you were speaking I turned to Sheila [Dillon, The Food Programme, Radio 4] and said, “I bet we don’t throw away chocolate” – but you’ve proved me wrong! I don’t envy the task of the teams of sorters – who had to go through all those containers, to determine what items of food had been thrown away. But the fruits of their labours – quite apart from all those whole apples they were extracting – is a frankly staggering picture of our wastefulness.
Waste reduction is a key priority for the Government, giving us our greatest environmental and economic gains. Just to put it into context, each year, we generate about 100 million tonnes of waste from households, commerce, and industry. And in our Waste Strategy, published last year, we put a strong emphasis on waste prevention and established a new target to reduce the amount of household waste not re-used, recycled or composted. And if we are to achieve a more sustainable lifestyle, we need to encourage behaviour change to reduce the waste we generate. So we cannot ignore the implications of the 6.7 million tonnes of food which this report indicates are wasted unnecessarily every year.
The release of this report highlights the extent to which the issue of food, and food waste, cuts across so many of the concerns that we as a Government are trying to tackle.
As Liz [Goodwin, CEO of WRAP] highlighted in her introduction, world food prices are rising across the globe, and we recognize that it is the poorest that will be hit the hardest. And the UK simply cannot afford to be wasting over 10 billion pounds worth of good food each year.
Food waste also, as others have indicated, contributes significantly to climate change. The majority of food waste will go to landfill, where it emits methane – a powerful greenhouse gas. But before it has actually got to landfill, as Liz and Ray said, it has already left its carbon footprint – in its growing, processing, packaging, transportation, and refrigeration. And, as they also said but I will repeat because it bears repeating, if we stopped wasting all the food that could have been eaten, we could prevent the equivalent of at least 18 million tonnes of CO2 emissions each year – which is equivalent to taking one in five cars off our roads. For every tonne of good food we can avoid throwing away, we can save four and a half tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
I can’t help but think, also, something about our diets. From the sheer volume and fruit and veg that we throw away, it appears we may be getting our ‘5 a day’, but we have to question whether we are actually eating them!
There is clearly a role for Government here, and we will continue to work with WRAP, both in support of the ‘Love Food Hate Waste’ campaign and through the Courtauld Commitment – our voluntary agreement with retailers and food manufacturers to identify ways to reduce packaging and food waste.
When I helped launch WRAP’s food waste campaign, ‘Love Food, Hate Waste’, last year – we highlighted the fact that UK households wasted around 6.7 million tonnes of food every year –about one-third of all the food that we buy to eat at home is thrown away. At the time, I have to say I found that a somewhat unbelievable figure. But this report helps to break down that figure – and show us exactly what is being needlessly condemned to the bin.
It is for this reason that I think that the real strength of the report lies in the fact that it not only paints the national picture on food waste, but also brings it home to the house and householder just what is the cost to them.
The fact that the UK as a whole pays for, but does not eat, £10.2 billion of good food each year is amazing. But the very fact that it is such a huge figure can make it difficult for people to understand their part in it. However - being able to say that the average household could save £420 a year by reducing their food waste, that might have more of an impact and encourage positive behaviour changes.
It is this individual behaviour change which I hope ‘The Food We Waste’ report will inspire. It’s clear that we often don’t realise how much we throw away – it becomes a reflex to see that soft apple and think, “oh, I’ll just put it in the bin”, or bread that has become hard – and we don’t stop and think about how we could have avoided it, or indeed whether we could still make use of it. I’ve been learning the hard way. Ever since I got a food digestor in my garden I’ve collected all my food waste separately. Initially I felt virtuous not putting that into my residual waste in my bin, but then I started asking myself why have I got so much food waste anyway? I think what shocked me most about this report was all the food thrown away and not even opened, not sampled. And have I ever done it? Yes I have – but I’ve learned the WRAP lessons.
Namely:
We need to start with what we buy. To know how much we need, spend a few minutes checking what’s in our cupboards, fridges and freezers, and thinking about what we might like to cook for the week ahead – and in my case writing a list for my husband to take to the supermarket! We all like to get a good deal when we shop, but we need to think carefully about those BUY ONE GET ONE FREE, “3 for 2” or “2 for 1” offers; chances are we’ll never get around to eating all of them.
We also need to improve the way we store our food. WRAP’s research shows us that 60% of us don’t know at what temperature we should keep our fridges. By keeping the fridge at 1 – 5 degrees, our chilled food will stay fresher for longer. Apparently, the average fridge temperature in Europe is 6.6°C. And by storing milk at this temperature instead of 5 degrees we lose up to a quarter of its shelf life. We can also use our freezers to keep food approaching its use-by date from going off – free for us to use another day.
And we can also stop doing as Ray has indicated, scraping over a million tonnes of food straight off our plates by cooking only what we can eat and thinking about portion sizes.
So there’s lots we can learn and lots we can do to save ourselves money and do our bit for the planet. And perhaps at this time we should reflect on whether we feel comfortable about squandering so much when people in other parts of the world can’t afford to eat at all.
This report, I think, greatly improves our understanding of our relationship with food and of precisely what (and how much) we are throwing away. I hope it will also help us to find the solutions we need to reduce the waste we generate in the first place.
Page published: 8 May 2008