Nursery World - A Unique Child: Health & Nutrition

Cutting food waste is important both ethically and environmentally.
Mary Llewellin explains how.

According to the UK Government's waste advisory body Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap), we throw away seven million tonnes of food and drink from our homes every year at a cost of £12.5bn. Not surprisingly, non-domestic food waste statistics are even more shocking, with the education sector featuring high on the list of offenders.

Nick Morrison, writing in The Guardian last year, claimed that 'the education sector produces 13 per cent of all non-domestic food waste in England, throwing out some 123,000 tonnes a year, the bulk of that going straight to landfill'.

Apart from the moral issue of throwing away food when many people go hungry, this wastage has a massive environmental impact. Food production and transportation contribute to a significant proportion of the world's CO2 emissions, and food waste in landfill produces methane, another greenhouse gas.

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