Producing, moving, storing and cooking food uses energy, fuel and water. Each of which let off greenhouse gases contributing to climate change.
Think of a pack of cheese - all the resources that go into raising the cows, producing and transporting the cheese, even the fuel we use to drive to the shop to buy it. That's a lot of wasted effort if it's just chucked away at the end of the week. In the UK we throw away the equivalent of more than 3 million slices of cheese a day!
Food requires a lot of water to grow and produce it. By wasting food we are wasting precious water supplies. It takes:
- 100 buckets of water to produce just one loaf of bread
- 54 buckets of water to rear one chicken breast
- 6 buckets of water to grow one potato
- one bucket of water to grow one tomato
It's also worth considering the amount of land required to produce food and drink. The estimated area of land required to produce food thrown away by UK households is 19,000 square kilometres, that's an area 7 times the size of Derbyshire!
A proportion of waste food will end up in a landfill site, where it rots and releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
If we stopped throwing this good food away it would save the equivalent of at least 36 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.