My Zero Waste are running National Waste Week 2010 from 6th – 12th September, and the theme this year is ‘Cooking for Victory’. According to WRAP’s “household Food and Drink Waste in the UK” report, we throw away 8.3 million tonnes of food and drink every year. Most of this is avoidable and could have been eaten if we had planned, stored and managed it better. This amount of food waste costs the average family in Britain £50 per month.

Over at My Zero Waste you can pledge to reduce your food waste during National Zero Waste Week, and be in with a chance of winning a prize! Maybe you’ll be identifying repeat leftovers and learning how to use them, focusing on your portion control or starting a new composting system.

Here in Oxfordshire they are gradually rolling out food waste collections, giving each household a caddy to collect food waste, which is then collected and used to produce green electricity. While this is great – it prevents waste from going to landfill, with all the environmental problems that entails – it does nothing to tackle food waste (unless people start to think about what they’re throwing away!) and requires energy to transport it away.

Hence the Master Composters are keen to encourage people to start, or continue, composting as much of their food waste as possible. Unavoidable kitchen waste that is easy to compost includes kitchen paper, plain cardboard packaging, egg shells, tea bags* and coffee grounds and fruit and vegetable peelings. Cooked food, meat, fish and dairy products are more difficult (unless you have a Bokashi system) and it’s those things that should be sent off in food waste collections for recycling.

Composting at home is really the most environmentally friendly option – doing so for one year can save enough greenhouse gases to offset all of the times you boil your kettle, or three months of using the washing machine. And you’ll get free fertilizer as well :)


*sadly it does depend on the tea bags you use to a certain extent.