What is food waste?
One third of food produced is wasted. This is around 1.3 billion tonnes of wasted food a year – enough to feed three billion people.
This wasted food could be the last few bites from your plate that you couldn’t quite finish, your bread crusts, your potato skins, or any other bits of food that you could eat, but don’t. We could make these foods into something delicious, but instead we throw them away.
Throwing food away not only wastes money, but also harms the environment.
How does food waste harm the environment?
As food decomposes (breaks down) in landfills, it releases carbon dioxide (CO2) – a planet warming gas which causes climate change.
Food waste creates 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2. If wasted food was a country, it would be the third largest producer of CO2 in the world - China and the United States would be the only countries producing more CO2.
Wasting food also means wasting water, as a lot of water is needed to grow and produce food.
It takes around 1,286 litres of water to produce a single loaf of bread - that’s about five bathtubs full! So, when you throw food away, this water is wasted as well as the food itself, causing even more of an environmental impact.
By reducing your food waste, you will be fighting climate change and saving water.
Enter our Slow Cook, Low Waste competition
At LiveWest, we believe in creating a greener future, together. We share lots of eco-friendly tips on our website, so that our customers and colleagues can work together to make small changes that have a big impact.
Now, we want to hear your tips. How do you fight food waste? Are you a savvy shopper, who meal plans before your weekly shop?
Or maybe you are a leftovers recipe champion, who always has a clever use for the scraps of food in your fridge at the end of the week?
No matter what your food-waste-fighting hack is – we want to hear it!
Enter our Slow Cook, Low Waste competition to share your top tip to reduce food waste and be in with the chance of winning a slow cooker.
We will be choosing our favourite food-waste-fighting tips to form part of our new Slow Cook, Low Waste recipe booklet, which we will share on our website to help others reduce their food waste. Customers who submit a winning tip will receive one of the many slow cookers we are giving away.
For full terms and conditions of the competition, or to enter, visit our win a slow cooker webpage.
For more ideas on how you can be more eco-friendly in the kitchen, visit our Cooking Green Advice page.