Report to the People
18th February 2008
Waste Not, Want Not
If
your purse or wallet is still reeling from keeping the kids fed and entertained
during last week’s half-term holidays, you might be looking for ways to
tighten your belt.
Rather
than depriving yourself of essentials like beer or bingo, though, why not start
by cutting out some waste?
As
figures last week reminded us, about a third of the food we buy is thrown in the
bin, at least half of which could have been eaten.
This works out at about £366 for every household every year.
But
this isn’t just a waste of your hard-earned money. Throwing perfectly good food in the bin when there are people
starving to death is, to put it mildly, offensive.
There’s
also an environmental cost. It
takes a vast amount of energy and resources to produce, transport and store the
650,000 tonnes of squandered food which we mostly send to landfill.
In fact, ending this waste would see carbon dioxide emissions cut by 1.4
million tonnes - the equivalent of taking one in four cars off the road.
The
main reasons we waste food are that we cook too much, let it go past its use-by
date or forget we have it. When all
of this could be avoided by a bit of simple household planning, there is no
excuse for it.
We
might live in a time of apparent plenty, but with resources becoming evermore
scarce, the old maxim of “waste not, want not” is more relevant than ever.
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