As I write this, it’s the week of Halloween. This time of year sees people across the world carve pumpkins as part of their decorations to celebrate this spooky time of year. However the real scary story is the amount of pumpkins that have the flesh scraped out – and then it’s just thrown away. According to Hubbub – a charity working to create positive environmental change, of the estimated 39.9 million pumpkins that were bought this year, 22.2 million will go to waste in the UK alone. Every pumpkin that ends up in landfill will decompose and release methane which has 20 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide. And this is just part of the reason why food waste is a big problem.
Waste of Money
Not only are the 22.2 million pumpkins an example of perfectly edible food gone to rot that could have instead been used to create delicious soups, muffins etc– but the money lost due to pumpkin waste is also a staggering £32.6 million. During an already worsening cost-of-living crisis, this feels particularly crazy. When we have families that are struggling to afford food and having to decide whether to eat or heat their homes, even in the UK, wasting millions of pumpkins is actually pretty horrendous.
Your fresh food has already had quite a journey
What is so easy to forget, is that every item of food in our fridges, freezers and cupboards each has it’s own carbon footprint before it gets to you. Every piece of fresh fruit or veg has required the right soil conditions, the perfect weather conditions, has potentially been hand picked, then transported to a warehouse to be sorted, packaged and THEN shipped to whichever part of the world it’s to be sold in, before it even goes in your basket to be brought home. Then think about every single individual ingredient in the ready made items. The mind boggles!
Waste of Water
In a book called The Last Drop by Tim Smedley, he details the way we’re using and abusing our precious water supplies. 1 particular example really stands out – avocados. Did you know that every avocado requires around 280 litres of water each, in order to grow?! This means if that avocado is wasted, aside from the footprint of it’s journey to the UK, around 280 litres of water has also been wasted. And this is just 1 example.
The Methane problem
As I touched on above, any food that gets thrown in to our general waste bin will end up sitting in landfill – and when it rots down it will emit methane. In fact, for every 3kg of wasted food, 23kg of methane is emitted. When you realise that 1/3 of all food produced ends up being wasted, you can see the scale of the problem we’re facing.
Avoiding food waste
So what can we do at home? There are several easy solutions. Introducing a ‘use me first’ box in to your fridge or cupboard will help flag items that need using first. It also helps to have a go to ‘use it all up’ recipe such as soup or a curry, where you can throw in any veg that’s starting to go passed it’s best. And if all else fails, compost it. Most councils now offer a food caddy, but if yours doesn’t, there’s lots of helpful tips online about getting your own compost started at home. Here’s a quick guide from the RHS to get you going https://www.rhs.org.uk/soil-composts-mulches/composting