Lewes District Council

Food waste

Food waste Some 30% of the waste thrown away is food. It makes more sense to buy less, use as much as you can and throwing away as little as possible.

Nationally one-third of food in the UK is bought and thrown away without. Half of this is still edible. That equates to 6.7 million tonnes of food waste, or one-fifth of all of our domestic waste.

The majority of this waste goes to landfill where it rots and produces methane. This is a very strong greenhouse gas that contributes significantly to climate change.

When disposed of it renders pointless the production, packaging and transport of the food. This is particularly important as the whole food supply chain accounts for around 20% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.

If we eat and didn't throw away this food, it's the equivalent of taking one in every 5 cars off the road in terms of greenhouse gas pollution . It could also save you around £250 - £400 a year by simply buying less food in the first place.

The Waste and Resources Action Programme has done considerable research into food waste and attitudes towards it.

Survey

To help get to the bottom of the issue, we asked nearly 300 households to keep a diary of the food they wasted during the course of one week. At the end of the week we asked them whether they were surprised by what they recorded.

Two-thirds of households had changed their minds about how much they thought they were wasting; many were surprised at the quantity of inedible waste such as teabags and peelings they produced.

Although this waste is inevitable, much of it can easily be composted at home, so that some value is extracted from it.

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Food waste

Survey