Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP)
Around a third of the food we produce worldwide is lost or wasted and it’s having a significant impact on climate change. In fact, it contributes a staggering 8–10% of total man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
That's food that goes unsold or otherwise unused in supermarkets and restaurants, and all the stuff we buy and which goes uneaten. It is all fuelling the climate crisis, exacerbating the greatest and most urgent challenge facing humanity.
It's why, in March 2021 WRAP are dedicating an entire week to raising awareness of the environmental consequences of wasting food, and promoting activities that will help make wasting food a thing of the past.
The UK’s first ever Food Waste Action Week will run from Monday 1 to Sunday 7 March 2021, and will bring together citizens and organisations from retail, manufacturing, local government, hospitality and across industry to demonstrate the impact of wasted food on people, on business, and on the planet.
Together we’ll confront the challenge, share knowledge and inspire changes in the way people think about the food we waste. We’ll explore the practical ways in which we can drive down the amount of food we waste and look at why in every sense – whether you’re a citizen, a business, or other organisation – wasting food makes no sense.
WRAP is proud to be partnering with some of the UK's leading businesses and organisations to deliver Food Waste Action Week.
Photo: Lewis Clarke https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/5873030
Food waste in the United Kingdom
Food waste in the United Kingdom is a subject of environmental, and socioeconomic concern that has received widespread media coverage and been met with varying responses from government. Since 1915, food waste has been identified as a considerable problem and has been the subject of ongoing media attention, intensifying with the launch of the "Love Food, Hate Waste" campaign in 2007. Food waste has been discussed in newspaper articles, news reports and television programmes, which have increased awareness of it as a public issue. To tackle waste issues, encompassing food waste, the government-funded "Waste & Resources Action Programme" (WRAP) was created in 2000.
A significant proportion of food waste is produced by the domestic household, which, in 2007, created 6,700,000 tonnes of food waste. Potatoes, bread slices and apples are respectively the most wasted foods by quantity, while salads are thrown away in the greatest proportion. A majority of wasted food is avoidable, with the rest being divided almost equally by foods which are unavoidable (e.g. tea bags) and unavoidable due to preference (e.g. bread crusts) or cooking type (e.g. potato skins).
Reducing the amount of food waste has been deemed critical if the UK is to meet international targets on climate change, limiting greenhouse gas emissions, and meet obligations under the European Landfill Directive to reduce biodegradable waste going to landfill. Equally great emphasis has been placed on the reduction of food waste, across all developed countries, as a means of ending the global food crisis that leaves millions worldwide starving and impoverished. In the context of the 2007–2008 world food price crisis, food waste was discussed at the 34th G8 summit in Hokkaidō, Japan. Then-UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said of the issue "We must do more to deal with unnecessary demand, such as by all of us doing more to cut our food waste".
In June 2009, then-Environment Secretary Hilary Benn announced the Government's "War on waste", a programme aimed at reducing Britain's food waste. The proposed plans under the scheme included: scrapping best before and limiting sell by labels on food, creating new food packaging sizes, constructing more "on-the-go" recycling points and unveiling five flagship anaerobic digestion plants. Two years after its launch, the "Love Food, Hate Waste" campaign was claiming it had already prevented 137,000 tonnes of waste and, through the help it had given to over 2,000,000 households, had made savings of £300,000,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_waste_in_the_United_Kingdom
Hunger in the United Kingdom
Chronic hunger has affected a sizable proportion of the UK's population throughout its history. Following improved economic conditions that followed World War II, hunger became a less pressing issue. Yet since the lasting global inflation in the price of food that began in late 2006 and especially since the financial crisis of 2008, long term hunger began to return as a prominent social problem. Albeit only affecting a small minority of the UK's population. By December 2013, according to a group of doctors and academics writing in the British Medical Journal, hunger in the UK had reached the level of a "public health emergency".
In the run-up to the 2015 general election, the issue of hunger in the UK became somewhat politicised, with right wing commentators expressing scepticism about figures presented by church groups and left-leaning activists. An All-Party MP group focusing on hunger in the UK has called for activists to be cautious in how they discuss the problem of domestic hunger, as exaggerated claims and political point scoring risk reducing public support for tackling the issue. In a 2016 report, the All-Party group stated it is not possible to accurately quantify the number of people suffering from hunger in the UK, and called for better collection of data. The UK government began the official measurement of food insecurity in 2019, and is set to begin reporting on this from March 2021.
Hunger in the UK was worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic with some food banks reporting that demand had more than doubled. August 2020 saw the United Nations agency UNICEF begin funding charities helping to feed hungry UK children for the first time in its history.
