Food waste prevention can help combat climate change, says WRAP
WRAP chief executive Liz Goodwin said that, food waste prevention is the number one task to help reduce the amount of biodegradable waste going to landfill. “We throw away 6.7 million tonnes of food every year that is 20% of everything we all put in our bins every week.
“In addition, if we implement food waste collections, then we remove a large element of the biodegradable fraction from the waste bin.”
According to WRAP we throw away 6.7m tonnes of food at home every year, half of which could have been eaten. Most of this ends up in landfill where it generates eight million tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
WRAP has recently partnered with 17 local authorities to run food waste collection trials, designed to identify the best ways of collecting and processing food waste. At least three of these are delivering food waste to biogas plants where it is broken down to a biofertiliser and the gas produced is used to generate renewable electricity.
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