It’s Food Waste Action Week – a week dedicated to raising awareness of the environmental consequences of wasting food. Did you know around 1/3 of the food we produce worldwide is either lost or wasted, and 45% of domestic waste across Birmingham is food.
There is a lot of food that goes to waste with produce being sent to landfill even before it reaches supermarket shelves. We think it’s wrong that so much food is being wasted especially with so many people across our city are going hungry.
Food Waste Action Week is an opportunity to promote activities that help make wasting food a thing of the past. At The Active Wellbeing Society, we work closely with allotments, supermarkets and partners, including Incredible Surplus to ensure that no food goes to waste.
On top of the surplus food donations sourced by Incredible Surplus, on average, we collect 480kg of surplus food every week. That’s equivalent to over 200 meals! We’ve been able to redistribute this food, that would otherwise have ended up in landfill, to people across the city through our Community Cafés. The Community Café cooks conjure up delicious meals with surplus food delivered on the day.
Food accounts for 30% of household emissions across the UK. To try and reduce the amount of food wasted, we can think about what we eat, how we eat and where we get our food from. There are many different ways we can do this, by batch cooking meals, eating more communally (when it’s safe to do so) and thinking differently about how to use up the food that we already have in the kitchen.
Find out more about Food Waste Action Week and ways that you can reduce your food waste to help the environment.
