FOOD WASTE

From entire crops of barely blemished potatoes, to shelves of supermarket sandwiches on their sell-by dates, it is a roll call of waste created by one nation that could lift 150 million people from starvation in one year. The ability of Britons to throw away food deemed imperfect, out-of-date or surplus to requirements was put into sharp relief with the revelation that 30 to 40% of all produce is simply binned. Research based on government statistics has found that, every year, food worth £20bn is discarded on its journey from the farmyard to the fridge. The study puts a figure for the first time on the profligacy of a supply chain where producers are forced to leave fruit rotting on trees because it does not meet supermarket standards and millions are throwing away food for the sake of a "best before" sticker.

Environmentalists and politicians described the statistics as a wake-up call for the Government and consumers to take urgent action to curtail the "monumental and offensive" waste of food. That £20bn of discarded food is equivalent to almost five times what Britain spent last year on international aid, including the ammount of debt relief to the world's poorest countries. With Britain struggling to meet its obligation to cut by almost half the 22.5 million tons of domestic rubbish, including 3.4 million tons of waste food, it sends to landfill sites in the next five years, a senior adviser to Tony Blair said the figures highlighted the iniquities of affluent Britain.

Lord Haskins, the former chairman of Northern Foods and a Labour adviser on rural affairs, said, "This reflects the worst side of us as consumers. We have built a society where we think food is cheap and can be thrown away. We have eyes bigger than our stomachs and buy too much. We eat too much and are too lazy or ignorant to do anything with the leftovers. Food is thrown away because we are obsessed with sell-by dates. Just think of the energy that goes into producing, distributing this food. There will be two to three billion more people to feed on the planet in the next 30 years without the land or water to produce their food. If the rest of the world adopts our behaviour, then the world will have real problems."

The research, conducted for BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth, catalogues the levels of waste on the journey from the farm gate through wholesalers, food processors and retailers to the consumer, using figures produced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the National Farmers' Union. Campaigners said the £20bn figure, which follows a separate report last year showing the average British adult throws away £420 of food a year, provided a stark contrast between the consumption of the developed world and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. A study published this month in America after a 10-year survey by the University of Arizona put the figure for food waste in the United States at 40 to 50%. Patrick Nicholson, of the Catholic aid organisation Cafod, said, "We spend nearly five times more as country on food we throw away than on helping the poorest countries."

According to United Nations estimates, £20bn is the amount needed per year until 2015 to stop the 150 million people in Africa suffering from starvation. The level of UK waste will give added urgency to efforts across the food industry to cut surpluses before new European Union rules, which will ban the disposal of food products in landfill sites by 1 January 2006. At least three million tons of produce is thrown away by the retail sector, including supermarkets, and food manufacturers. Instead, companies must explore new disposal methods such as bio-fertilisers and ultra-fast composting. The availability of surplus food has given rise to the phenomenon of "freegans", people who live on food ejected into industrial-sized supermarket dustbins. A charity, Fare Share, now supplies 12,000 meals a day to homeless and vulnerable people using surplus food provided by supermarkets.

The sandwich chain, Pret A Manger, also gives away its unused food to the needy at the end of the working day. Despite such schemes, critics of the supply system criticised the "obsession" of retailers with unblemished produce. One arable farmer who, until 2004, supplied Tesco with potatoes, said, "Two years ago, I was forced to discard a whole crop because the potatoes failed a blemish test. They were all perfectly good to eat but they rotted in the ground because they did not live up to our twisted idea of perfect food. We have our priorities wrong." Campaigners said that it ultimately falls to individual households to cut down on the waste to meet an EU target already achieved by most Scandinavian countries of recycling 45% of waste by 2020.

The current level of domestic waste sent to landfill sites, 22.5 million tons, must be reduced to 6.4 million tons by 2020, requiring a dramatic increase in the use of composting bins supplied by local authorities alongside recycling of packaging and glass. Paddy Tipping, the sitting MP for Nottingham Sherwood and chairman of Labour's environment committee, said, "Food waste has not been tackled well by any of us. The responsibility lies with both the Government and consumers to use this most valuable of commodities more effectively. These figures are a wake-up call which none of us can ignore." There's a nasty, smelly problem out there, and it's not getting any smaller. With the economy booming, we just keep buying things. And then throwing things away. And all the time a tide of rubbish is creeping closer to our front doors.

It stems from the boxes your trainers and your PC come packaged in, and the bottles holding your wine and the carton holding your pizza, and then from the trainers and the PC themselves when you get rid of them, as you soon and surely will, seeking newer and better ones to go with the newer and better decorations and furniture your sitting room requires. Britain's throwaway society is consuming more than ever; it is also, as a consequence, creating waste faster than it has ever done before. Never mind industrial and commercial waste, there is a mushrooming mountain of domestic waste, the stuff that you and I produce at home. Fifty years ago, the main contents of our dustbins was indeed dust, or in fact, ashes from domestic coal fires, upon which much household was burnt, thereby shrinking its volume enormously.

Now we burn nothing at home. We load our bins with a steadily-growing pile of pizza cartons, drink cans, fast-food remnants, packaging of all kinds and mammoth piles of paper. Figures now show that a fifth of the food we buy in supermarkets goes straight into the bin. The throwaway society shows no signs of changing course: consumerism has us too firmly in its grip. But the waste mountain that leaves behind is now starting to spill out of its landfill sites and into politics as those in power wrestle with how to contain it. It will be a canny politician indeed who can cope when the irresistible force of our waste growth finally meets the immovable object of Brussels legislation. (Source: The Independent)