Separating your food isn’t a new idea let’s be honest. We’ve all been the grumpy five year old, pushing the carrots or sprouts to the edge of our plate with a thoroughly disgusted look plastered across our little face. Separating your food waste from your other household waste however is a practise that can have slightly more dramatic global consequences than missing out on some smelly veg’ (yes I still hate sprouts!).

WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) have reported that we – the general public – don’t mind separating our food waste (when given the appropriate equipment for storage) and of the 94,000 households offered the trial initiative, around 70% took part. Obviously this ties in well with the WRAP ‘love food, hate waste’ initiative, that aims to change the way we all buy food, showing the benefits to the environment and your weekly shopping spend if you only buy what you need and what you’ll actually eat (not to mention that it’d save food waste, and all the extra complexities involved in the production and transport of excess food).

“The collected food waste was either composted at in-vessel facilities or treated by anaerobic digestion.” And WRAP calculated that redirection of the 4,400 tonnes of food waste ‘saved’ the equivalent of 2,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions in little over a year, bargain!

The initiative shows that even those of us who don’t have use of the family compost bin can and will make the effort if given the choice.

WRAP Summary
http://www.wrap.org.uk/wrap_corporate/news/public_supports.html

Full Report
http://www.wrap.org.uk/local_authorities/biowaste/separate_food_waste.html

Love food hate waste
http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/