Food Waste Set to Soar over Festive Season

Editor's notes:

Christmas tips that make the most of our festive food from Love Food Hate Waste

• Heat small amounts of left-over mincemeat in a pan and spoon over ice cream for an alternative Christmas pudding
• Stilton or other cheese can be frozen if you can’t get through them, and don’t forget that strong cheese makes great sauces and soups
• Keep the onion left over from making bread sauce. Chop it and mix into the stuffing for the bird
• Add herbs or even chilli to leftover veggies and meat, and make a wonderful, hot soup to have after the Boxing Day stroll.
• Chestnuts are highly perishable because of their low fat content. To keep them fresh enough to use for a week or so, put them in a plastic bag in the salad drawer of the fridge. Freeze those you don’t wish to eat over Christmas
• Pile leftover smoked salmon onto toasted bagels spread with cream cheese and sprinkle with lemon juice and black pepper. Or mix into scrambled eggs for a Boxing Day breakfast.

Key Facts

•  In the UK we are throwing away one third of the food we buy. That’s like one in three bagfuls of food shopping going straight in the bin.
• We throw away 6.7 tonnes of food each year in the UK, when most of this food could have been eaten. (Its not just peelings and bones –its good food).That’s equivalent to filling Wembley Stadium with food waste 8 times over!
• In terms of environmental impact – producing, storing and getting the food to our homes uses a lot of energy. If we stopped wasting all this good food (food which could have been eaten), it would save the equivalent of at least 15 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.  That’s like taking 1 in 5 cars off UK roads.
• Most of this food reaches landfill sites where it emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
• High economic cost - £8bn worth of food thrown out. That’s the cost to our pockets as consumers. UK householders are throwing out on average £400/year.
• We throw food out for two main reasons: we cook or prepare too much; and we let food go off.
• 90% of people unaware we waste so much food. But when we tested this with a food diary, most people wanted to take action – that’s why WRAP has launched a brand new campaign to help.

1. For more information on the Love Food Hate Waste campaign, visit: www.lovefoodhatewaste.com
2. Key findings of our recent research on the nature, scale and causes of household food waste can be found at: http://www.wrap.org.uk/retail/food_waste/index.html
3. WRAP works in partnership to encourage and enable businesses and consumers to be more efficient in their use of materials and recycle more things more often. This helps to minimise landfill, reduce carbon emissions and improve our environment.
4. Established as a not-for-profit company in 2000, WRAP is backed by Government funding from Defra and the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
5. Working in seven key areas (Construction, Retail, Manufacturing, Organics, Business Growth, Behavioural Change, and Local Authority Support), WRAP’s work focuses on market development and support to drive forward recycling and materials resource efficiency within these sectors, as well as wider communications and awareness activities including the multi-media national Recycle Now campaign for England.
6. More information on all of WRAP's programmes can be found on www.wrap.org.uk