The Hidden Costs of Food Waste for Our Planet

The problem of food waste extends beyond the inconvenience of scraping that extra portion of pasta into your bin at home – because really, who can measure pasta correctly? –  it encompasses the entire food consumption system, from top to bottom. Starting with farmers, bleeding into stock forecasts and ending with masses of families and the conundrum of poorly portioned carbs.

This chain leads to millions of tonnes of perfectly good food being needlessly wasted each year.

Looking beyond how absurd this problem seems when thousands of people in the UK are struggling just to put food on plates, the complications entangled in the web of food waste are just as much tied to the environment as they are to food poverty.

Every crumb of food headed to waste is an opportunity for food businesses to make a difference for both our community and planet.

The good news? There’s a solution.

 But first we need to understand the sheer scale of the problem.

Here are the headlines:

-              Approximately 1/4 of all food manufactured in the UK is wasted.

-              The carbon emissions from the volume of food waste are equivalent to the total emissions produced by 1/5 all cars on the road

-              Food waste is responsible for 16 million tonnes of c02 in the UK and is naturally a major hurdle towards any plan for net zero emissions.

The problem is massive and massively under-addressed.

What’s the big picture?

When food isn’t consumed, the emissions generated throughout the product’s lifetime are wasted too. This ranges from the emissions used when growing produce and raising cattle, to those spent by maintaining habitable conditions in greenhouses or incubators. It extends further, to the fuel consumed through transportation, and the energy used to manufacture products themselves.

 Beyond this, any other resources necessary for the production of food – such as land, water and labour – are also turned into collateral waste when produce goes unused. The volume of wasted potatoes alone – the worst offender for wastage in the UK – requires the equivalent farmland square footage of the entire City of Manchester and uses enough water to provide every person in the UK with a cup of tea 1,200 times!

All of this doesn’t even factor in just how valuable and life-changing this food could be to thousands of families across the country. Yet, it goes to landfill, incinerators or further processing, incurring even more environmental costs and not even filling the bellies of the UK’s hungriest whilst doing so.

Humans need to eat.

The carbon emissions generated in food production are largely unavoidable, but wasting the food they produce doesn’t have to be.

One thing is clear: wasting food doesn’t benefit us or our planet

So, what is the solution?

Dealing with food waste isn’t as simple as setting out to generate less and hoping that we waste less in return. Some amount of carbon emissions and food waste is inevitable.

But, at The Big Difference, we believe that the pathway to a more environmentally conscious future is intertwined with the path to a happier and healthier Southampton. We can nurture both our planet and our community at once by redistributing this perfectly good food before it goes to waste, and – if we all do our bit – we can ensure that less food is turned into trash and our environment can begin to recover.

We have already shown the value in services like ours, which take surplus food destined for landfill, and make it accessible to those in need. The Big Difference’s efforts alone have seen almost £8 million worth of food redistributed over the course of six years – and the demand is only mounting.

We now redistributs 70 tonnes of food back into the community each month.

That’s:

-              110,000 meals put on the tables of those who need it most.

-              Almost 200 tonnes of c02 emissions – the equivalent emissions of a standard petrol car driving 465,000 miles – saved from redundancy every four weeks.

But the story doesn’t end here.

There is still more we can all do to manage the environmental impact of food waste, and The Big Difference’s efforts in redistribution prove this.

Every business in the industry has surplus. The question is whether it becomes waste, or a meal for someone who needs it most. We believe that good food should never be the end of the story when our community and environment is on the line.

With your support, The Big Difference can continue to provide invaluable support to the city, set our sights higher and grow our support network further.

Explore our impact page for more on what we’ve done!

See how you can help us to continue making a big difference!