THE PRIDE OF BRITAIN REDUCING A TOWNS CARBON FOOTPRINT

The carbon footprint of the world, your country, your community can be viewed in many ways but one of the simplest and most overlooked is the food we waste. Waste food will go to landfill. I guess that’s obvious to us all but what you might not know is that supermarkets supplying millions of pounds worth of food each week, order enough with some to spare. Just in case!

So, in your town if the combined supermarkets sell one million pounds worth of food each week, between 1% and 5% of it goes to waste. Between £10,000 and £50,000 worth of food.

When we talk about waste you might think of food that’s no longer fit for consumption, but the supermarkets are a living breathing logistical machine and they have to keep rotating their stock. Often this 'waste' is food simply approaching either a Best Before or Use By Date. So, in theory, food that is perfectly fine, dare I say still high quality, is wasted and put into landfill and we all know that landfill is a major contributor to methane gas, the greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.

And then we consider the current times of rising inflation and poverty and the onset of the UK's winter of discontent, and we should be able to see some simple solutions.

At Northwich Community Support (NCS) we have a small army of unpaid volunteers utilising local and national contacts to locate, collect and collate this surplus food. We then very simply distribute it to our community via a small network of hubs. We encourage donations for this food and a good example or rule of thumb is that someone can expect to walk away with £40+ of grocery shopping for a donation of around about £5. The £5 is used to pay for insurance and food labelling and other incidental costs of running a charity.

Times are indeed tough, but the people of Britain are proud. Foodbanks carry a stigma and handouts 'are for people on benefits' but we all know there is a lot of grey in that area. We allow people to work with us to reduce the towns carbon footprint and as a happy by product, they get to stretch their weekly budget just that little bit further. No matter how you look at it, that’s a WIN WIN!!!