Meeting of the Parliament 15 December 2016
First, I inform members—as I believe we have to do on these occasions—that I am the parliamentary liaison officer to the Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform.
As the MSP for Aberdeenshire East, which includes the town of New Deer, I am delighted to speak in a debate on food waste, as New Deer is a major Scottish hub for the recycling of food waste, with Keenan Recycling there handling 50 per cent of Scotland’s food waste. That amounts to 50,000 tonnes of food waste per annum, of which 30,000 tonnes is collected from restaurants and other food outlets. Keenan’s turns the vast proportion of the food waste tonnage that it receives into British Standards Institution-approved agricultural compost. That compost, as well as being a means of reusing food waste instead of sending it to landfill, fulfils a dual environmental protection purpose by replacing chemical fertilisers in maintaining the fertility of the farmland soil that is used to grow our food. Keenan’s also converts food waste into clean biofuel for anaerobic digestion plants that produce electricity or gas for the public grid. The company has acquired a site at Linwood, in my friend Tom Arthur’s constituency of Renfrewshire South, and plans to mirror there the state-of-the-art facility in New Deer, which will more than double the capacity for biofuel.
A Scottish Government initiative launched in January 2016 stipulated that any food outlet producing more than 5kg of food waste per week must segregate it from other waste and have it collected, which improved on the previously stipulated threshold of 50kg for food waste. During a visit to Keenan’s recycling centre earlier this year, I spoke to the managing director, Grant Keenan, who informed me of the amount of food waste that is recycled from small food outlets, bringing their practice into line with that of larger food outlets and improving further the level and quality of the food waste that is recycled into the products that I have described.
I want to highlight the good work of Zero Waste Scotland in the area of food waste education. Of course, the number 1 priority in all waste management is to completely eliminate waste in the first place. The cabinet secretary mentioned the good to go trial that encouraged restaurants to offer doggy bags to customers to take home leftovers of food that had not been eaten. The trial has been highly successful and might change our culture with regard to customers asking to take leftovers home because, for some reason, we have been a wee bit reluctant to do that.
Talking about cultural changes, I have found that having a food waste bin in my home and a local authority food waste collection service has increased my family’s awareness of the amount of food waste that we generate. Aberdeenshire Council has taken a number of measures to reduce food waste and to improve our behaviours around food buying, storage, segregation and recycling. It might have taken my generation a wee while to get used to segregating and recycling food waste, but it is already second nature to my children, who do it without thinking at home, school and college. Through education around minimising food waste, we will make those good habits second nature for us, too.
Such behaviours, when encouraged at national and local government levels and hugely assisted by programmes such as those that Zero Waste Scotland promotes, are the reason why we have a very good chance of meeting our food waste reduction targets by 2025. With households, businesses and the public sector carefully segregating what we still produce, we can ensure that our food waste ends up being useful rather than being sent, as it has been historically, to landfill.
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