The average family in the UK throws away around £730-worth of food every year.
How do we do this without meaning to? It’s a disaster for the environment and it's not great for the household budget either.
This week is Food Waste Action Week, organised by Love Food Hate Waste. Their website is full of great advice on how to reduce food waste. The adverts - shown here in the blog - illustrate how the contents of a humble food waste caddy are turned into energy or fertiliser.
Food waste falls into two camps - avoidable and unavoidable.
Avoidable food waste
Producing food waste unnecessarily is usually the result of lack of forward planning, which leads to shopping on automatic pilot. But a bit of time spent thinking ahead is well worth the effort.
- Plan meals for the week, taking into account how many people will be eating. It's also worth noticing if you have a tendency to make too much 'just in case'. Start to notice how much people actually eat.
- Reuse leftovers – there are excellent recipe books and online guides to give you ideas.
- When you have time, batch cook and freeze portions. Having good freezable containers in different sizes makes this easier.
- Check out apps and influencers for advice on how to shop smartly, not blindly.
- Don’t dismiss small steps – together they make a big difference.
Unavoidable food waste
With the best will in the world, ordinary mortals who aren’t into eating eggshells or tealeaves, will have some unavoidable food waste.
The best way to deal with this is of course to rely on Mother Nature’s brilliant recycling system – composting. Browse our range of composters here.
Surprisingly, the Great Green Systems team all live in local authority areas that have extended deadlines for separate food waste collections. So if we didn’t compost, our waste would be going to incineration or landfill for a few more years yet.
You can't beat the feeling of taking control of your own organic waste and turning it into top compost.
So even when we do have council collections, we’ll still keeeeeep composting (with apologies to Strictly).
