News – 21 February 2023
Do you know how much edible food is thrown away each year by UK households? Around 6.6 million tonnes! Almost three quarters of this is food we could have eaten and a quarter of this is down to preparing, cooking or serving too much, costing us £3.5 billion each year.
Food Waste Action Week is being held from 6 to 12 March with a theme this year of ‘Win. Don’t bin’, so we’d like to share with you some handy websites and apps that can help you to stop binning food, winning you more time and money, and reducing the impact on climate change.
- The Love Food Hate Waste website has a food guide so you can type in leftover ingredients and it will come up with ideas for using those leftovers or how to store them.
- The same website also has ideas to help you help you improve your food habits, including checking what you need, writing a shopping list and how best to store your food, so you can get the most out of your food as well as your budget.
- The BBC Good Food guide has ideas on how to cut food waste, including tips on freezing, batch cooking and re-heating food: bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/how-reduce-food-waste
- The free OLIO app is a food sharing app (but you can share non-food items too!) that can help you to cut down on waste. It connects you with local businesses and your neighbours, so that surplus food can be shared rather than thrown away. It could be bread from the local baker, food nearing its sell by date or even spare home-grown veg.
- There’s also the Too Good to Go app, where you can rescue a ‘magic bag’ of surplus food from shops and restaurants to save it going to waste, all for a reduced price. You then arrange to collect at a pre-set collection time.
- Look out for ‘wonky veg’ in your local supermarket as it’s often cheaper and is a brilliant way to reduce food waste. (Once upon a time, not so good-looking veg was binned!)
- Composting will reduce the amount of food waste that goes into landfill and provides you with free fertiliser for your garden. If you don’t have a garden, check whether your local council provides a food waste recycling service.