Senior Research Fellow of Mathematics, Computing & Technology at the OU, Christine Thomas, talks about how reducing food waste could make a massive difference to the environment and to your pocket, with wasted food costing the average family with children £680 a year…
“We all know that recycling is good for the environment, or at least we should do, it saves energy, cuts carbon emissions and reduces the amount of waste needed to be processed or sent to landfill. It has been estimated that increasing home recycling by 10% and buying more products with recycled materials content could save the average household 9kg CO2 over the course of a year.
“An increasing number of people recycle but we can do more, in fact we need to do more. Recycling can also be good for us in that it can make us feel better about not taking action elsewhere and also the environmentally damaging things that we may consider a necessity, such as driving instead of using public transport, or just the sheer amount of waste we create.
“Take food, for example: 8.3 million tonnes of food, much of it edible, is thrown away by households in the UK every year. Food waste is also harmful to the environment: when food waste goes to landfill it releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Not to mention the waste of energy from producing, storing and transporting the food and dealing with the subsequent waste.
“The startling fact is that if we all stop wasting food, the CO2 impact would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 4 cars off the road – the equivalent of 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year.”
How you can make a difference
The Love Food Hate Waste campaign was set up by the Government to raise awareness of the need to reduce food waste. The campaign website features a range of tips and tools to reduce food waste, from a portion planner to recipes for leftovers and information on what best before dates really mean.
The OU on iTunes U has created three collections of educational content specifically on subjects related to climate change: www.openuniversity.co.uk/climateweek