A great week to reduce your food waste

Challenge yourself to cut your food waste

Monday 6th March marks the start of National Food Waste Action week. How about using this week to set yourself a challenge to reduce the amount of food you throw away that could have been eaten?  We’ll be popping in from time to time with some tips and ideas to help you on your way. 

We think you might be surprised by just how much edible food goes into your bin each week. The end of the loaf that’s gone stale or mouldy, the food left on plates at the end of a meal, the bag of vegetables that you thought you’d get through but never did, not to mention the meal you prepared only to find out that someone in the family had different plans for the evening. 

Oh, and let’s talk about all those plastic containers full of left overs that you put in the freezer being absolutely certain that you would remember what was in them and then having to take pot luck when you were looking for something for dinner.

At the moment we don’t have a separate food waste collection in Blackburn with Darwen and so all of our food waste gets put into our kitchen bin along with the rest of our rubbish. Out of sight out of mind, maybe but let’s do something about it.

Need some convincing?

Here are a few pieces of information that might encourage you to take the challenge:

• • 36 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions could be prevented by saving food from our bins in the UK. How about doing your bit towards reducing these?
  • In Blackburn with Darwen we throw away approx 5,700 tonnes of edible food that could have been eaten every year. Wouldn’t it be great to bring that figure down?
  • The average household could save £720 a year if we stopped throwing away edible food. That’s a whopping £60 a month. What could you do with an extra £60 a month

So, are you up for the challenge? If so the website Love Food Hate Waste is full of How To Guides, ideas and recipes to use up those leftovers. How about picking just one or two of them to try to turn into a regular habit? We’ll be popping in from time to time with some tips and ideas to help you on your way. 

If you are in Blackburn on Tuesday 7th we’ll be in the Mall between 11am – 3pm talking to people about food waste. Pop by and share you ideas.