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Domestic waste and recycling advice

9 January 2009

The London Energy Saving Trust Advice Centre can now give detailed help and information on household food waste, disposal of old appliances and furniture, composting and recycling.

When the landfill tax comes into effect next year, the UK will be fined half a million pounds for every day that it does not reach set targets. It is not hard to figure out where this money will come from. So if you would like information on REDUCING household waste, REUSING what you can, and RECYCLING what you can't reuse call the EST free phone number on 0800 512 012.

To give you an idea of the amount of waste unnecessarily produced (i.e. edible and in date) in the UK every day, the Love Food, Hate Waste website recently carried out a detailed look into what households were throwing in their bins. Some of the shocking results are below:

Top 5 fruit & vegetable league table by estimated tonnage of waste per annum

Top 5 of avoidable fruit & vegetables wasted in UK

Estimated tonnage of waste per annum

Numbers of avoidable fruit & vegetables wasted per day

Apples

179,000

4,400,000

Potatoes

177,000

5,100,000

Bananas

78,000

1,600,000

Tomatoes

46,000

2,800,000

Oranges

45,000

1,200,000


Key Facts from the Love Food Hate Waste campaign:

  • In the UK we are throwing away one third of the food we buy. That's like one in three bagfuls of food shopping going straight in the bin.
  • We throw away 6.7 million tonnes of food each year in the UK, when most of this food could have been eaten. (It is not just peelings and bones - it is good food). That's equivalent to filling Wembley Stadium with food waste 8 times over!
  • In terms of environmental impact - producing, storing and getting the food to our homes uses a lot of energy. If we stopped wasting all this food, it would save the equivalent of at least 15 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. That's like taking 1 in 5 cars off UK roads.
  • Most of this food reaches landfill sites where it emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
  • High economic cost - at least £8bn worth of food that could have been eaten is thrown out every year. That's the cost to our pockets as consumers. UK householders are throwing out on average more than £400/year.
  • We throw food out for two main reasons: we cook or prepare too much; and we let food go off.

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