Food, glorious food. The problem is, we are still wasting far too much of it, even when we don’t prepare it ourselves. A new voluntary agreement to help combat avoidable waste in the hospitality sector is being implemented following a report published last year by WRAP.

The report, on the composition and volume of rubbish generated by the industry, concluded that hospitality outfits produce 400,000 tonnes of avoidable food waste every year, the prevention of which could save in excess of £722 million. For each pub, restaurant, hotel and quick service restaurant (QSR) in the UK, that equates to an average potential saving of £1,800 on avoided food purchasing and disposal costs, on top of the reduced use of landfill and waste disposal services.

Government waste policy has tended to focus on domestic and municipal rubbish, but the waste thrown away by each household – around six kilogrammes (kg) per week – is dwarfed by the quantities some hospitality businesses are binning on a daily basis.

WRAP believes its voluntary agreement for the hospitality and food service sector can make a big difference to how businesses think about their waste and could trump any legislative drive to enforce better practice. Retail Programme Manager at WRAP, Charlotte Henderson, says: “The voluntary approach looks to avoid legislation, and is preferable to legislation because it can go further and faster.” Around 3.4 million tonnes of waste is generated by the industry each year with just 48 per cent being recycled, reused or composted. A further 43 per cent – or 1.5 million tonnes – of mixed waste (made up of paper, card, glass and the avoidable food waste) is sent to landfill. The average amount of waste produced by individual hotels, pubs, QSRs and restaurants respectively stands at 149, 52, 23 and 65 tonnes annually, and WRAP wants to unite businesses in an attempt to reduce waste and boost recycling rates industry-wide. Ultimately, it wants the sector to work towards sending zero waste to landfill, but through consultation has arrived at a set of realistic targets to get the ball rolling. At the time of writing, WRAP is reviewing feedback from its initial proposals, but wants signatories to the agreement to cut food waste by five per cent and increase recycling to 70 per cent by 2015 – both targets deemed ‘achievable’ in workshops carried out with industry representatives.

Increasingly, local authorities are offering special commercial waste collections and, using current methods, around 80 per cent of the waste sent to disposal could be recycled. One of the major problems WRAP faces is that the number of surveyed businesses that see recycling as a priority sits between just four and 16 per cent, and nearly a quarter of businesses fail to recycle anything at all.

Although the agreement is voluntary, WRAP hopes the potential economic benefits to participating businesses may be a key motivator in persuading those businesses to commit to the scheme. With 70 per cent of food waste across the sector being avoidable, there is scope for businesses to make practical changes based on good financial sense. Indeed, Henderson asserts: “The economic benefits for companies taking part in the voluntary agreement are an important area for businesses to focus on.”

In a series of case studies, WRAP came up with a variety of examples where food outlets managed to cut waste by, for example, no longer putting salad garnishes on plates of food after staff noticed that the customers rarely ate them. The message is that small changes made industry-wide could lead to big money savings and massive reductions in avoidable food waste.