Giant Waste Planet Shows Food Waste Impact on Environment
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We were thrilled to support Love Food Hate Waste with the rollout of their 2022 food waste campaign: Food Waste Action Week and to support the build of a 10ft food waste planet to demonstrate the amount of food people throw away each year.
Our Changing Waste site near Howden, which is part of BioteCH4, supplied the food waste and facilities used to create the powerful installation, which was at the centre of the UK’s second national Food Waste Action Week. The 7-day food waste campaign, organised by Love Food Hate Waste, ran from 7-13 March and aimed to demonstrate how food waste in our own homes is feeding climate change.
6.6 million tonnes of household food waste is thrown away in the UK each year.
This food waste is responsible for nearly 25 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, equivalent to 5.4% of the UK’s territorial emissions. The majority, 4.5 million tonnes, is food that could have been eaten and is worth approximately £14 billion (or £60 a month for an average UK family).
Plant manager Lee Sanderson said:
“Throwing good food away is a terrible waste that can have far reaching impacts on our environment. There are a lot of things we can do as individuals and as companies to encourage each other to think differently about what is in our fridges and cupboards.
“We were really proud to work with Love Food Hate Waste on this important project and hope it helps people rethink what they put in their bins.”
We operate food waste-fed anaerobic digestion plants across the UK that turn unavoidable food waste from local authorities, food manufacturers and producers, food distributors, waste management companies and commercial food waste businesses, into biogas that is fed back into the country’s gas grid.
Unavoidable food waste is packaged and unpackaged food and drink that cannot be sent to food banks or used for animal feed.
In 2021, BioteCH4 handled 730,000 tonnes of waste across our sites, enough to fill the Royal Albert Hall nearly eight times.
Changing Waste processed nearly 100,000 tonnes of food waste in 2021. This in turn stopped 50,000 tonnes of CO2e from entering the earth’s atmosphere should it have been disposed of in landfill sites.
Image credit: PA Images
