recycling - what about food waste?

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Recycling - what about food waste?

Recycling rates in Brighton & Hove have soared over the past few years. But there's a long way to go before we can really pat ourselves on the back.What about food waste, for example?

We're recycling a mountain of paper, card and glass, and have some of the best rates in the country. Cityclean, the council's in-house recycling department, provides a kerbside recycling service to 97,000 households in the city and collects communal recycling from 17,000 properties.

The results speak for themselves. In 2000, Brighton & Hove residents recycled and composted 10% of their total household waste. In 2007 we exceeded 28% - and our performance continues to improve every year. We're also doing well on reducing our household waste.

To see how we can improve our performance further we have analysed household waste across the city over the period of a year. This work has shown us that in areas with recycling collections:

• 63% of paper and card is recycled
• 37% is still thrown in the rubbish bin
• 73% of glass is recycled
• Only 34% of cans are recycled; and
• Half of the plastic bottles are recycled.

Last year the average household recycled:

• 260 glass bottles and jars
• 364 plastic bottles
• 624 drink and food cans
• 312 newspapers and magazines

Taken as a whole, the information shows us that not everyone is recycling, and many people that do recycle can recycle more. We estimate that if all householders recycle all the materials we currently collect, our recycling rate across the city would increase to 38%, helping the environment and keeping costs down.

A third of our rubbish is food!

The waste analysis has also shown that on average, every household throws away 139kg of food waste per year ­ a third of our household waste. It is estimated that in the UK the average person throws away food to a value of £250 - £400 per year or up to £24,000 in a lifetime.

Throwing away food is a relatively new phenomenon. It's not that long ago that people didn¹t waste any food, and any scraps were used as pig swill!

It is not just food waste that is the problem, much of the food we throw away will have been grown using precious water resources, polluting fertilisers, will then have been carefully packaged and will increasingly have been flown in to the UK from the far corners of the globe, resulting in high 'food miles' just to end up in landfill sites.

If everyone halved the amount of food waste they threw away, which should be easily achievable, it would result in a 15% reduction of our residual waste, reducing our impact on the environment and our collection and disposal costs.

What can you do?

If we all do our bit we can significantly reduce the amount of waste we throw away:

• make sure you recycle all you glass bottles, cans, plastic bottles, paper and card and encourage your friends, family and neighbours to participate in the recycling services/facilities provided. Every little bit helps!
• try to reduce unnecessary waste, shop sensibly, store your food properly to delay it going off and try to use up 'left-overs'. Food waste represents 35% of the average household bin in Brighton & Hove
• have a go at composting garden waste and vegetable peelings at home to create your own compost!

See here to find out more about your recycling service, or call Cityclean on (01273) 292929.

See here to find out more about food waste, and what you can do to reduce the amount of food you throw away, from the specialist website www.lovefoodhatewaste.com

Food waste facts

• food haulage accounts for 25% of HGV miles in the UK
• 6.7 million tonnes of food waste is thrown out by householders in the UK
  every year. Most of this could have been eaten
• the energy used to produce, package, transport and deliver food to our
  homes in the UK is at least 15 million tonnes of CO2 every year
• if we could eliminate food waste, this would have the equivalent impact of
  taking 1 in 5 cars off UK roads
• 28% of our city's household waste is recycled The equivalent weight of 7300 elephants per year!

Landfill issues

Since 2000, annual waste has decreased by 2000 tonnes, bucking national trends of waste growth. This reduction is largely down to residents composting garden waste and food waste at home, rather than putting it out in their waste collection. 

Since 2006 the council has been promoting home composting and provided heavily subsidised compost bins.

But we still need to do more. Beddingham Landfill, the site on the South Downs serving Brighton & Hove is rapidly filling up. Opening more landfill sites is not an option as  this type of waste disposal is bad for the environment and results in emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which contributes to global warming (currently about 3% of UK emissions).

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions all local authorities face fines through EU legislation if they continue to landfill too much. For Brighton & Hove these fines would run in to millions of pounds, (which would have to be paid through council tax) if we do not reduce the volume of waste we tip in landfill sites.

Late festive cheer

Residents in Brighton & Hove have recycled a whopping 20,833 Christmas trees this year. The trees, left at collection points all over the city, were collected by council contractors Connick Tree Care and will be turned into woodchip and used by Cityparks throughout the year.

Environment councillor Geoffrey Theobald said: "Once again residents have done us proud by dropping off a record number of Christmas trees for recycling. We now want to encourage all those residents to carry on recycling their garden waste all year round by home composting or using the council¹s two household waste sites."