Food: Homes chuck £10bn of food
UK bins £10bn of food a year
Thursday, 08 May 2008 14:24
UK homes chuck out £10 billion in wasted food a year, according to a new report, despite rising food prices.
Waste & Resources Action Programme (Wrap) found the average household throws out £420 of good food a year. For the average family with children, it's higher at £610.
High levels of food wastage come despite food prices rising 4.7 per cent in the last year, data from the British Retail Consortium (BRC) revealed yesterday.
Wrap claims a third of all food bought is thrown away and more than half of that is not even past its sell-by date.
Local authorities spend £1 billion a year to dispose of food waste.
Liz Goodwin, chief executive of WRAP, said: "What shocked me the most was the cost of our food waste at a time of rising food bills, and generally a tighter pull on our purse strings.
"It highlights that this is an economic and social issue, as well as about how much we understand the value of our food.
"Tackling the problem of food waste will be at the heart of WRAP's work over the next three years."
Each day 1.3 million unopened yoghurt pots, 5,500 whole chickens and 440,000 ready meals are thrown away in the UK, the report said.
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."
Stopping the waste of good food could avoid 18 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents from being emitted each year – the same as taking one in five cars off of UK roads, Wrap said.
Food prices are now rising for a number of reasons – as bad harvests couple with greater global demand for food.
Gonzalo Baranda, from investment marketing at JPMorgan Asset Management, said: "There are several reasons [for rising food prices].
"On the supply side poor harvests due to adverse weather conditions and decreasing growth in productivity have not been able to cope with the increase in demand.
"On the other side, demand has been affected by long-term trends; an increasing world population and a change in consumption patterns in rapidly growing emerging markets with, for instance, an increase in the consumption of meat."
Prices of corn and other crops have also been hit by the growth of biofuels.
"Demand has also been altered by powerful short-term factors. One is the growth in demand for heavily subsidised biofuels, which have especially affected the price of corn, soybean and other crops competing for the same cultivable land," said Mr Baranda.
"More recently, however, we’ve seen massive interest from many investors in an asset class which offers some protection against a falling dollar."
Sarah Routledge