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It’s not just apples either the largest portion of an average household’s rubbish is organic waste. 20% of most people’s bins are cooking waste or leftover food. According to a recent report 40% of fresh fruit and veg is thrown away. In terms of the food we buy it’s like throwing away one bag for every three bags bought.
Unsurprisingly then it's pretty staggering how much rubbish we produce; every person in the UK chucks out seven times their body weight each year. Each week, the average family in a developed country gets through four glass bottles or jars, 13 cans, three plastic bottles and five kilos of paper. Although I suspect I’m personally bumping up the wine bottle and paper averages. And if all this doesn’t get recycled it ends up in landfill and after my discoveries about the horrors of animal methane as a greenhouse gas it turns out that landfill is the UK’s greatest source of methane. Oh dear.
If you’ve been keeping an eye on the newspapers recently (and then recycling them of course) you’ll have noticed the hoo-ha about plastic bags. Apparently Gordon Brown’s promised to ban them although he might just have a point when you consider that 17 and a half billion plastic bag are given away by supermarkets each year which is enough for us all to have 290 each.
17 and a half billion plastic bag are given away by supermarkets each year which is enough for us all to have 290 each.
Now even though all this is pretty bad we are recycling more than ever before. The proportion of household waste composted or recycled was 22.5% in 2005. What’s more the plan is to recycle 50% of the UK’s rubbish by 2010, which apparently we might even manage. In fact Litchfield in Staffordshire is nearly there already recycling 46% of their household waste.
But if you’re really bothered about all this waste stuff then you might want to become a fregan. Fregan’s live a lifestyle in rejection of our modern capitalist society and only eat things that have been reclaimed: what all this amounts to is that they find their food in bins.
Now this sounds gross but they don’t tend to go rooting through the average household bin but rather focus their efforts on shops and supermarkets who throw out plenty of edible food that is slightly damaged or nearing its sell by date. If this column has opened your eyes and you fancy a lifestyle change then head to freegan.info and I’ll probably see you hanging around Marks and Spencers sometime; A girl’s got to have some standards after all.
A friend of mine engages in some food liberation and it's amazing how much good stuff gets thrown away by supermarkets before its "use by" date, in perfect condition.
Also, I don't make a habit of watching Wife Swap but I saw one a few months back with a family of fregans on which was quite an eye-opener.
I find the biggest reason I through fresh fruit/veg away is mainly because it's not fresh any more, and because supermarkets insist on selling stuff in multipacks (it is absolutely impossible to buy single large onions in the Sainsbury's near me) you'll often end up with that one left-over onion or pepper from that mixed pack you bought that you don't have anything to cook it with, and then when you do, you find it's going off.
Potentially organising more communal food sharing with my housemates would be a possible solution, but we're nowhere near that organised.
Have a look at http://www.freegan.org.uk
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