There are, as Mark Twain had it, lies, damned lies and statistics. And, for anyone who has been following the recent publicity over the treatment of food waste, the quote is more relevant than ever.
Look at almost any newspaper you care to read, and you will find that 6.7 million tonnes of food is wasted every year. 5.9 million tonnes are collected. 4.8 million tonnes are sent to landfill. And the balance, of just over a million tonnes, is separated by the public, collected in purpose-made bins and disposed of in centralised plants.
John Cockram is managing director of Greencone, which produces food waste digesters for use in the home These statistics come from no more authoritative a source than the UK government, courtesy of its agency WRAP. WRAP carried out considerable research to establish the make-up of rubbish put out for collection, with researchers ferreting through bins across the country.
Around the country a range of strategies for at-home disposal exist. Some people use garden composters, wormeries or Food Waste Digesters (garden-based units which take all types of food waste). Others feed it to their animals or send it down the sewers.
How many people do this? And how much food waste do they save? We have, at the moment, absolutely no idea.
It seems as though the government, having settled on its preferred solution — to segregate food waste and put it out for collection — failed even to consider, let alone to quantify, other methods.
Why does this matter? Most agree that disposal at source is environmentally far preferable to transporting food waste to centralised plants, breaking it down, then transporting it back to be spread on the land.
And WRAP's own figures show that, even in those areas where councils very actively promote separate collection, only about 50% of people will separate their food waste for collection.
While one can only support WRAP's efforts to persuade the supermarkets to reduce wasteful promotions and the public to use their leftovers more effectively one has to question whether more collection is the way forward.
Interestingly, WRAP's own estimates class 40% of total food waste (circa 2.6 million tonnes) as unavoidable: the teabags, the bones and the pulp already used for stock. Surely it is this element of waste, alongside the unquantified amount that householders already dispose of at home or in their garden, which we should be looking at?
Yet food waste digesters, which can handle precisely this kind of unavoidable waste – which common or garden composters cannot manage – do not currently figure in the government's research, let alone its strategy.
While WRAP's research does not cover food waste digesters, it has shown that we treat food waste differently when we dispose of it at home.
Families who use composters put out less waste than those who do not use composters: not so much because more goes on the compost but because less is wasted in the first place. In other words? Treating food waste at home leads to thought about food which leads, in its turn, to behavioural change.
This behavioural change and sense of ownership is not evident in families which rely on centralised schemes to pick up their food waste like so much other rubbish. And, since 50% of food waste is not even separated for centralised collection, it seems a new strategy is long overdue.
Yet currently our own government cannot even quantify those members of the public who are helping us help ourselves by getting rid of food waste at home. Perhaps next time their researchers could look beyond the bins and into the garden? They might find some pleasant surprises.
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