by melo
Sun Jun 8th, 2008 at 04:38:22 PM EST
Waste is everywhere, but none so obviously reflective of unconsciousness perhaps than this...
Supermarket waste hits new high 1.6m tonnes of food goes to landfill each year, sustainability watchdog reports
By Susie Mesure
Sunday, 10 February 2008
An 18-month study found that "too many supermarket practices are still unhealthy, unjust and unsustainable"<
The Government must get tougher with supermarkets if it is to tackle Britain's growing mountain of food waste, a report on Labour's sustainable food policies will warn this week.
The warning comes amid growing concern at the amount of food that ends up as landfill rather than on people's plates. Retailers generate 1.6 million tonnes of food waste each year.
An influential watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), will condemn targets set by the Government's waste-reduction programme as "unambitious and lacking urgency". It will also say multi-buy promotions are helping to fuel waste and obesity in Britain. Speaking to The Independent on Sunday ahead of the report's publication on Saturday, Tim Lang, SDC commissioner, said it was "ludicrous" that the Government had not pressured retailers into setting tougher targets to cut waste.
Three years ago, the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) left it up to supermarkets to find voluntary "solutions to food waste" in an agreement dubbed the Courtauld Commitment. "The Government is frankly not using its leverage adequately. It really should toughen up on Courtauld, which must be enforced because this is ludicrous," said Mr Lang, who is also professor of food policy at City University, London.
The 18-month study, which found that "too many supermarket practices are still unhealthy, unjust and unsustainable", said Wrap should adopt a "more aspirational approach to reducing waste in food retail by setting longer-term targets and [supporting] a culture of zero waste".
Richard Swannell, Wrap's director of retail and organic programmes, defended the Courtauld goals, set in 2005. "We couldn't set a target for reducing food waste because we didn't know what the scale of the problem was," he said. Instead, Wrap focused on reducing packaging waste - though even here the SDC report called its progress too slow. Mr Swannell said Wrap intended to unveil targets on cutting food waste by the summer.
The report comes at a critical time for Wrap, which is facing budget cuts of 25 per cent. Last week the body, which is campaigning to get consumers to throw less food away, issued 31 redundancy notices. Steve Webb, Liberal Democrat environment spokesman, attacked the cuts. "It blows a hole in any credibility the Government has on the environment," he said.
A separate study by Imperial College for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, found that supermarkets preferred to throw away food that was approaching its sell-by date rather than mark it down in price. "The cost of staff time is greater than the money made on the reduced items," the research found, citing a supermarket executive who said it cost the chain £11m a year in labour and lost margins to slash prices.
more below...
What a waste: Britain throws away £10bn of food every year Global food shortages, soaring prices and alarm over the environment. But every day, Britain throws away 220,000 loaves of bread, 1.6m bananas, 5,500 chickens, 5.1m potatoes, 660,000 eggs, 1.2m sausages and 1.3m yoghurts
A new study has exposed the staggering amount of food thrown away every day by the British public, calculating that the annual total of wasted products adds up to a record £10bn.
Each day, according to the government-backed report, Britons throw away 4.4 million apples, 1.6 million bananas, 1.3 million yoghurt pots, 660,000 eggs, 5,500 [CORRECTED] chickens, 300,000 packs of crisps and 440,000 ready meals. And for the first time government researchers have established that most of the food waste is made up of completely untouched food products - whole chickens and chocolate gateaux that lie uneaten in cupboards and fridges before being discarded.
The roll call of daily waste costs an average home more than £420 a year but for a family with children the annual cost rises to £610.
The Government's waste campaign Wrap (Waste & Resources Action Programme) revealed the extent of Britain's throwaway food culture after sifting through the dustbins of 2,138 people who signed up to an audit of food detritus. Other items on the daily list included 1.2 million sausages, 710,000 packs of chocolate or sweets, 260,000 packs of cheese, 50,000 milkshake bottles and 25,000 cooking sauces.
The study is published as millions of the world's poor face food shortages caused by rising populations, droughts and increased demand for land for biofuels, which have sparked riots and protests from Haiti to Mauritania, and from Yemen to the Philippines. Last month India halted the export of non-basmati rice to ensure its poor can eat, while Vietnam, the second-biggest rice exporter, is considering a similar measure after Cyclone Nargis ripped through Burma's rice-producing Irrawaddy delta.
In Britain yesterday, it emerged that food prices had risen by 4.7 per cent in the past month. The soaring cost of wheat has increased food prices in the UK by up to 11 per cent in the past year, putting more pressure on domestic budgets already struggling to cope with higher mortgage costs and council tax and energy bills.
More salient 'externalities':
The Environment minister, Joan Ruddock, said: "These findings are staggering in their own right, but at a time when global food shortages are in the headlines this kind of wastefulness becomes even more shocking. This is costing consumers three times over. Not only do they pay hard-earned money for food they don't eat, there is also the cost of dealing with the waste this creates. And there are climate- change costs to all of us of growing, processing, packaging, transporting and refrigerating food that only ends up in the bin. Preventing waste in the first place has to remain a top priority."
Eliminating the huge level of food waste would have significant environmental consequences. Local authorities spend £1bn a year disposing of food waste, which leads to the release of methane, a potent climate-change gas. Wrap calculated that stopping the waste of good food could reduce the annual emission of carbon dioxide by 18 million tonnes - the same effect as taking one in five cars off the roads.
Food experts said the study should serve as a wake-up call to British consumers. As well as an individual "Victorian moral" effort, Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, called for the Government to take action to improve the efficiency of the food system to face up to the challenges of climate change, rising oil costs and water shortages. Describing modern supermarkets as "cathedrals of waste", he said: "The British food economy is one of the most wasteful it would be conceivable to design. We have to create a new set of criteria on what we want the food economy to address; it's time for politicians to catch up."
Previously, Wrap's Love Food, Hate Waste campaign put the financial cost of the 6.7 million tonnes of food discarded annually in the UK at £8bn. After interviewing 2,715 households - and then analysing the contents of most of their bins - researchers found that people were throwing away a greater proportion of edible, unused products. Rather than half new food and half peelings and scrapings from plates, the proportion of entirely unused products was 60 per cent by weight and 70 per cent by value.
Overall, that meant the total level of waste was £2bn higher, at £10bn, with the untouched products discarded worth £6bn. Of those, products worth £1bn were still "in date", Wrap found.
Launching The Food We Waste report, Wrap's chief executive, Liz Goodwin, described its findings - which mean that one in three shopping bags is dumped straight in the bin - as "shocking".
When I was a young man, i entered into an anthropological experiment by joining a commune based in Seattle called the 'Love family'.
They practised the biblically sanctioned art of Gleaning, which consisted of going to local farmers and asking them if we could go and harvest what the paid harvesters had left behind, the produce too broken for supermarket display, or which dropped off the back of the tractor. It was astounding how much we returned with, and how many people we nourished with it.
The hygenic implications of the new fashion of 'freeganism, or 'dumpster-diving', as it used to be titled, are pretty dire, apparently the law is turning a blind eye to the practice out of compassion, but surely we can do better than this.
Why not pay people to sort through the waste produce before throwing it in the dumpster, and then distribute it to the poor?
Why not subsidise teenagers to gain 'in-the-field' experience planting trees, and gleaning? (Except when there are toxic chemical residues)
Are farmers in Europe still ploughing under crops tp preserve higher prices? (Free market forces alert)
I'm confident readers here will have good insights and suggestions about this subject, which really highlights the credibility gap concerning our efforts in the 'first world' to do something serious about world hunger.
Peace out-
