Meeting of the Parliament 15 December 2016
I am delighted to participate in this debate on delivering Scotland’s food waste target.
The Scottish Government has pledged to cut food waste in Scotland by a third by 2025, as has already been referred to. In order to meet that target, a number of food collection measures will be necessary, but emphasis also needs to be placed on prevention of food waste. My comments will address that issue.
At the start of the year, the Scottish Government launched Scotland’s first-ever circular economy strategy—“Making Things Last: A Circular Economy Strategy for Scotland”. Waste prevention is a key feature of that strategy. The document states that
“The first priority in a more circular economy is to avoid unnecessary waste and use fewer resources in the first instance.”
In “Prevention is better than cure: The role of waste prevention in moving to a more resource efficient economy”, the UK Government stipulated that
“Optimising material inputs and reducing wastage through design has to be the starting point of a resource efficient economy. It is not enough to just recycle waste; action is also needed to prevent the waste from being created in the first place.”
One way of encouraging waste prevention is through education, and the love food, hate waste campaign does that very well. Its success can be attributed to its selection of handy tips and hints on anything from portion sizes to storing food, as well as to its innovative recipe ideas, all of which help individuals, businesses and organisations to reduce their food waste. With that advice, people will get the most out of the food that they buy and will, at the same time as they save money, eat more healthily.
We are presented with some quite disturbing figures in Zero Waste Scotland’s “How much food and drink waste is there in Scotland?” report. It claims that, in 2014, 60 per cent of household food waste was classed as “avoidable”. That means that food with a price tag of over £1 billion—an average of £460 per household—was put in the bin in that year. We need to do more because of such figures. Everyone, from individuals to businesses, has a role to play in addressing the challenge of food waste prevention. It is imperative that the Government continues its efforts and that it uses the resources that are at its disposal to promote good practice and invest in educating people on how to prevent and reduce food waste.
Joined-up thinking and working together will result in targets being met and, ultimately, in a reduction in the amount of food that is wasted. We could learn lessons from the Courtauld commitment 2025, which has brought together organisations from across the food sector to try to cut the resources that are needed to provide our food and drink by one fifth over 10 years. Currently, that commitment has more than 120 signatories, which range from supermarkets and trade associations to Government departments and local authorities.