Waste Awareness Wales (WAW) has launched a new campaign this week to tackle the issue of food waste.
It is hoped this campaign will maintain Wales’s trend of increasing recycling municipal waste and help towards its self-imposed target to recycle 70 per cent of all waste by 2025.
Currently, less than half of the 400,000 tonnes of food and drink waste created in Wales each year is recycled while the rest goes to landfill.
‘Love your leftovers’
The new bilingual campaign urges Welsh residents to prevent food waste by storing food correctly, planning meals and not cooking more than is needed.
Short and direct adverts urge residents to ‘love your leftovers’ and explain how different foods can be kept fresher for longer, how to correctly measure portion sizes and what different food types can be frozen.
According to WAW, preventing food waste not only helps the environment, but could also ‘help save up to £50 each month’ for each household.
The campaign also encourages the use of kerbside food waste collection services, which are offered by all of Wales’s 22 councils, and reportedly cover nine out of 10 households.
Welsh residents will soon see advertisements showing how food waste can be used to make compost fertiliser or treated using anaerobic digestion to create biogas which, according to the campaign, can provide “power [to] around 19,000 Welsh homes each year”.
Using new technology to ‘take the campaign further’
Print adverts will also feature QR codes, which can be scanned and will take the consumer to a section of WAW’s website that includes video animations explaining anaerobic digestion and waste treatment and to more information about food waste prevention.
Andrew Osborne of WAW told Resource: “We wanted to include the QR codes to monitor how many people are proceeding to find more information. By using new technologies like this we are able to take the new campaign a step further than previously.”
‘Make people think twice’
Osborne added: “Each year in Wales we produce enough food waste to fill over 10,500 double decker buses. This is a staggering amount of food and, unfortunately, much of this ends up going straight into the bin, yet it can all be recycled.
“All LAs in Wales offer a food waste collection scheme so it makes sense to use your kitchen caddy to recycle any food waste.
“Look out for our adverts in newspapers, busses, online and on the radio. I hope the campaign will have a positive effect on food waste recycling and make people think twice when dealing with their food waste.”
Read more about Waste Awareness Wales.
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