Greenhouse Effects: Food waste

Tony Juniper

Food security is set to become a big issue at a time when the population is rising fast, oil and gas prices are volatile and climate change is having an increasing impact. It also raises huge environmental questions related to chemicals and energy use, the demand for land, and emissions of greenhouse gases.
In the UK, we discard about a third of our food and drink — that is, about 8.3m tons, at an annual cost of about £12 billion. For the average family with children, this equates to £680 spent each year on food they don’t eat. Some of this is unavoidable: meat comes with bones, eggs have shells. Even so, about 5.3m tons of waste could be avoided.
More than half of this comes from not using food in time: often, it is thrown away untouched or unopened. Most of this ends up in landfill, where it rots, producing methane, the second most important greenhouse gas contributing to global warming. Doing away with food waste would have the same climate-change benefit as taking one in four cars off our roads.
One reason we waste so much food is that prices are relatively low. In the 1950s, food accounted for more than a quarter of the household budget. Now it is just 10%. Recently, however, prices have increased, and this is set to continue, so there are sound economic reasons to change our ways.
An excellent website called Love Food Hate Waste provides ideas on how to reduce your waste, as well as information on storage, recipes and useful tips for leftovers (see www.lovefoodhatewaste.com). The festive season is a good time to think about food waste. Last year, we spent more than £500m on Christmas dinner alone.
- Having backed a campaign for boiler-scrappage payments — similar to those for cars — I was especially pleased to see the chancellor announce a scheme last week. Householders will get £400 towards a new, more energy-efficient boiler when they trade in an old model. Up to 125,000 households are expected to be eligible.
Tony Juniper is an environmental campaigner and former director of Friends of the Earth; tonyjuniper.com