Households across Norfolk and Suffolk are being urged to sign up for a mission to do their bit to protect the planet and help get the best out of salad and vegetables.
Mission Food Savvy is targeting these items in the war on waste as they are some of the most thrown away foods in the two counties.
The summer campaign promotes savvy ways to store salad and vegetables to keep them fresher to be savoured another day; or send them undercover in delicious dishes to make sure nothing goes to waste.
Using a fun, hero agent theme, the campaign reveals how everything from tomatoes to cucumbers, carrots to broccoli, can escape the waste bin through better planning, storing and cooking.
Mission Food Savvy is the latest in the well-established Food Savvy campaign, run jointly by Norfolk County Council and Suffolk Waste Partnership. The campaign inspires households to reduce food waste by:
Suffolk Waste Partnership and Norfolk County Council work together on the Food Savvy campaign.
Rob Cole of the Suffolk Waste Partnership, said:
“Households in Norfolk and Suffolk throw away enough food in a year to fill Norwich Castle almost 25 times over, or 155 Bury St Edmunds cathedrals.* What we are challenging people to do is to make it their mission to plan what they need and not waste food or money.”
Councillor Eric Vardy, Norfolk County Council cabinet member for Environment and Waste, said:
"The average household wastes over two months’ worth of food each year - that's more than £700. Reducing food waste is good for the planet and our pockets, especially as many of us are working hard to make our budgets stretch further. We hope residents embrace our Food Savvy mission and are inspired to use up their leftovers."
The average household wastes over two months’ worth of food each year (around £730).**
As well as financial savings there are environmental savings too. If everyone in the UK stopped throwing away food for just one day it would be the same as taking 14,000 cars off the road for a whole year.
*Volume of food waste calculations based on 737,883 households in Norfolk and Suffolk (Census 2021). It assumes each household has a waste bin with a capacity of 240 litres, so the total volume of waste bins in Norfolk and Suffolk is about 177.1 million litres. Our research shows that 35% of this volume contains food waste, therefore the volume of food waste in the waste bins is about 62 million litres. There are no official stats to the volume of local landmarks, but we can make some rough estimates for illustrative purposes. For instance, the volume of food waste in the waste bins is roughly equivalent to:
**The average household wastes £700 of food each year. The latest ONS survey shows our region, ‘East’, spends £66.40 a week on food and non-alcoholic beverages (ONS Family Spending Workbook 3 – 31 May 2023). Annual wastage figure divided by weekly spend makes an equivalent of 10.54 weeks, and 4 weeks per month makes 2.5 months.
***The greenhouse gas emissions associated with the 9.5 million tonnes of food waste in the UK in 2018 have been estimated to be around 36 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), according to the latest report from Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP). [ONS]
