Originally uploaded by Sharon Pavey
We’re getting more serious about recycling in our house now and have set up a new system in the shed. Tasha (aged eight) shows us how we sort out the weekly recycling.
Let’s Stop Wasting Food in Devon!
Watching Countryfile tonight – which is raising the issue about the food which is thrown away BEFORE it even reaches the supermarkets! This reminded me of someone I was chatting with on twitter a couple of weeks ago who gave me a couple of links to sites about food waste. Thanks @DottyTeakettle !
The Love Food, Hate Waste campaign says – Every year in the UK we throw away £12 billion worth of food which could have been eaten. Love Food Hate Waste is a campaign from WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) which shows that by doing easy practical everyday things in the home we can all waste less food, which ultimately benefits our purses and the environment too.
If we all stopped wasting food that could have been eaten, it would have the same environmental impact as taking 1 in 4 cars off UK roads. lovefoodhatewaste.com has lots of delicious recipes to use up leftovers, handy hints and tips for storing food to make it last longer, a portion calculator to help you cook the right amount, and information on what food date labels mean. There is something for everyone, whether you are a keen cook, or simply want to reduce the amount of food which you throw away.
The WRAP website tell us that “Every tonne of food waste prevented has the potential to save 4.2 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.”
Apparently Sustain (the alliance for better food and farming) kicked off interest in local food years ago when they published a paper called Eating Oil advocating local food networks. This is an amazing website – which I know I will be reading again and again. The Sustain charity advocates food and agriculture policies and practices that enhance the health and welfare of people and animals, improve the working and living environment, enrich society and culture and promote equity. Sustain represents around 100 national public interest organisations working at international, national, regional and local level.
The last website I was advised to look at is Tristram Stuart’s site. This young chappie (pictured below) was on Countryfile tonight, really interesting bloke! For the past ten years, he has reclaimed most of his food from the bins of supermarkets and other shops as a protest against the scale and gratuitous causes of food waste.
His new book, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (Penguin, 2009), reveals that modern Western countries waste more food than they consume, and that tackling this problem is one of the simplest ways of reducing pressure on the environment and on global food supplies.
Please add your comments below – I think we’ve just lifted the lid off the jar on this one – excuse the pun !!! More to come on this issue. Good news in my area of East Devon though that they’re starting waste food collection in a few weeks, not something we need at the moment though as our food scraps go to the chickens and vegetable peelings, tea bags, eggshells etc to the compost heap.
Tetrapak Recycling in East Devon
My little boy finished off the orange juice this morning, showed me the carton and said “Can we recycle this Mummy?” What a clever 4 year old!!! Now I know our kerbside collection doesn’t include juice cartons so I used www.recyclenow.com to look up how and where we could recycle drinks cartons here in East Devon. Cartons are now collected by over 370 local authorities across the country, which equates to 86 per cent of UK and Guernsey local authority areas.
Recyclenow advised me to use www.tetrapakrecycling.co.uk. I used the Where Can I Recycle button at the top of their site to look up where cartons are collected in my area and found this info below:
The nearest place for us is Honiton so we’ve started a collection of tetrapaks. Now we just need to work out what to do with the plastic milk bottles!! Anyone?