Food and drink production and consumption in the UK today accounts for 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, 70% of our total water footprint and £19-billion-worth of waste annually.
The figures provide a stark reminder that the challenge of improving economic and environmental sustainability is still with us, even while other issues, such as training, diversity, pay, budgets and productivity, have taken their share of our attention over the past few years.
The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) has just published a report titled ‘Resource Revolution: Creating the Future’, in which the government-funded organisation outlines its plans for 2015–20.
Three priority industries are identified: food and drink, clothing and textiles, and electricals and electronics.
Liz Goodwin, WRAP’s chief executive, says foodservice operators and food retailers are in her sights: “Our programme for delivering a step change will look to reinvent how food products are designed, sourced and processed to reduce their impact throughout the product life cycle.
“We want to encourage a rethink of our relationship with food, helping consumers get more value from food and waste less, and we want to redefine what is possible in getting best value from avoidable food waste.
“We all need to adapt to changing circumstances and shifts in the external operating environment.
“WRAP has taken its own advice; we have taken action to evolve our future by becoming a charity, diversifying our funding base and embracing more new ways of working.
“Actions matter. If we don’t tackle the issues we collectively face, the world will be a poorer place, and the future for our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will be impaired. We have a collective responsibility to address pressing global problems and leave a positive legacy,” she said.
With that in mind WRAP’s 2020 goals are:
- help people eat well and waste less
- encourage food businesses to reduce resource risks and the impact of food and drink products across their life cycle
- increase the amount of perfectly edible food for redistribution, ensuring more people in need are fed
- reduce waste of carbon, water and materials across the supply chain.
So, how much food is wasted each year in the UK, how much is being done already to reduce the figure and what more can be achieved in years to come?
The value of food waste in the UK is difficult to gauge accurately because the way figures are estimates involves scaling up data from comparatively small samples to provide a national total.
However, WRAP’s own working figure of £19 billion seems a reasonable place to start, and comes from its document ‘Estimates of Food and Packaging Waste in the UK – Grocery Retail and Hospitality Supply Chains’, which was updated earlier this year.
Based on three major studies it carried out in 2013, estimated annual food waste from UK households, hospitality and foodservice, food manufacturing, retail and wholesale sectors is put at 12 million tons, 75% of which it believes could be avoided.
Goodwin says: “This had a value of over £19 billion a year and was associated with at least 20 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
“Around 90%, by weight, of the avoidable food waste arises in households and food manufacture, although waste arising in one part of the supply chain is certainly influenced by other parts of the chain.”
In addition to this 12 million tons, WRAP also estimates that three million tons of food waste is generated by other sectors in the UK, including food thrown away by consumers out of home – from home-made lunches at work or as litter, for example – and the pre-factory-gate stages of the food supply chain.
“This results in an estimated 15 million tons of food waste in the UK each year. In comparison, around 41 million tons of food is purchased in the UK, meaning that the amount of food wasted throughout the supply chain is equivalent to around a third of that purchased,” says Goodwin.
The WRAP studies provide enough detail to allow a more detailed picture of the waste situation within what the organisation terms hospitality and foodservice (H&FS). This category includes staff catering, healthcare, education, services, restaurants, quick-service restaurants, pubs, hotels and leisure, and is estimated to generate 2.87 million tons of food, packaging and other non-food waste, of which 46% is recycled, sent for anaerobic digestion (AD) or composted.
Of this, 920,000 tons is food waste worth £2.5 billion. To try to provide a way of visualising what this means, WRAP says it is the equivalent of 1.3 billion meals – or one in every six of the eight billion meals served each year.
But it’s not all leftovers that people didn’t eat: 21% of the waste is accounted for by spoilage, 45% as a result of food preparation and 34% is scraped from consumers’ plates.
As things stand, 510,000 tons goes directly to landfill, 140,000 tons is discharged into the sewer system, 160,000 tons is reused to extract heat from it or as fertiliser for landspreading, while about 100,000 tons is recycled through anaerobic digestion and composting.
The WRAP studies suggest that about 700,000 tons of the food waste created by the hospitality and foodservice sector is what it calls “preventable food waste”. This is obviously the target for initiatives to reduce the volume of food that is wasted.
It is interesting to note that 40% of this waste is accounted for by three food types: potatoes and potato products (21%), bread and bakery products (12%), and pasta and rice (7%). WRAP estimates a quarter of the catering and hospitality industry’s food waste figure can be attributed to “unavoidable” food waste such as fruit and vegetable peelings.
In addition to the 700,000 tons mentioned earlier, a further 130,000 tons of food waste is generated from the preparation of ready-to-serve food items and meals for the H&FS sector at food manufacturing sites. Most of this, though, is counted within the estimates for the manufacturing and retail sector.
Goodwin says: “We waste more food than packaging, and food waste has a significantly greater impact on the environment.
“Packaging has an important role to play in protecting and preserving food, and a lot of work is being done to optimise packaging.
“Without packaging, we couldn’t get products to the customer. We need the right amount of packaging to protect and preserve products, and prevent product waste.
“In fact, packaging prolongs the life of food and helps prevent waste. It is important that industry and designers optimise packaging by using recycled content, improving design for recyclability and actually reusing to minimise environmental impact through ideas like refills and self-dispensing.”
It is worth mentioning that existing campaigns have already had a significant effect in reducing UK food waste, and increasing recycling across catering, industry and households.
For instance, between 2007 and 2012, the amount of food waste generated by the supply chain once products have left the farm has dropped by 1.6 million tons or 12% a year.
WRAP estimates that in 2015, this could well rise to two million tons worth £4 billion, and that would mean the UK will have avoided 12 million tons of food worth £24 billion being wasted since 2007.
The principle way that the catering industry engages with WRAP’s aims is the Hospitality and Food Service Agreement, a voluntary accord to support the sector in reducing waste and recycling more.
Signatories include the vast majority of the contract catering sector such as Aramark, Bartlett Mitchell, BaxterStorey, Centerplate, Compass, Gather & Gather, Harbour & Jones, ISS, Lexington, OCS, Pabulum, Sodexo, Tayside Contracts, Vacherin, Waterfall Services and 7 Day Catering.
The agreement is due to report in 2016 on progress to date. Its targets are to:
- reduce food and associated packaging waste arising by 5% by the end of 2015 – this will be against a 2012 baseline and be measured by CO2 emissions
- increase the overall rate of food and packaging waste being recycled, sent to AD or composted to at least 70% by the end of 2015.
The challenge has now been taken up by Biffa, which has launched a new collection service for the estimated 348,000 tons of food waste created each year by small and medium enterprises in the catering industry.
Available across 22 areas of the UK, the service allows small businesses to have their food waste collected as often or as little as required for £7 a lift. The waste is diverted from landfill and instead sent to AD plants to be converted into energy.
In Scotland, for instance, businesses producing more than 50kg of food waste a week are now required to present it for separate collection and, from 1 January 2016, legislation will also cover those producing more than 5kg of food waste a week.