Use your loaf: charity urges end to food waste
A Scottish action group is calling for supermarkets to slash the amount of food they throw away in a bid to reduce the impact on the world’s poorest communities and the environment.
Estimates show ten million tonnes of uneaten food end up in bins each year in the UK alone, with a value of more than £17 billion.
This is responsible for about 20 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions being released into the atmosphere annually, contributing to climate change.
They are asking for retailers to halve their food waste by 2030 and produce an action plan to show how this will be achieved.
Stores are estimated to bin at least 115,000 tonnes of food waste across the UK annually. Figures from Tesco suggest that up to 44 per cent of bread produced in the UK is left uneaten.
Lynne Paterson, director of Tearfund Scotland, said: “In Scotland we throw out enough food from our homes each year to make 800 million meals – an incredible figure when we think about the one in nine people around the world who go to bed hungry every night.
“In the communities where we work we meet people who are literally crying out for their daily bread, yet we are throwing away more than two million slices of it every day.”
