WRAP research has found that around £12 billion of food is thrown away each year by UK households, and approximately 4 million tonnes of household food waste ends up in landfill every year.

According to consumer insights undertaken by WRAP, the main barriers to people taking action to reduce their food waste, or to effectively participate in their collection service, is a lack of awareness that they are wasting food, how much they are wasting, and a failure to realise the benefits of reducing and recycling it.

WRAP has said the research and suggested communications schedules and templates aims to help local authorities ‘communicate more effectively’ with their residents about food waste and help reduce ‘the avoidable waste of good food and maximise the recycling of what’s unavoidable where there’s a food waste collection’.

It is hoped that by communicating about food waste as a whole, and raising residents’ awareness of how much food is wasted, councils will see an increase in participation in recycling and engagement in prevention activity, and see more successful roll outs of new services.

The tools will be updated as WRAP gathers more evidence from on-the-ground food waste collection rollouts.

Local authorities can access the following materials from the WRAP website:

• Food waste messages for maximum impact – how to engage your residents in prevention and collections;

• Food waste messages for maximum impact: research slides(results of consumer research undertaken to help develop more effective communication);

• Effect of food waste collections on arisings: recent evidence (a review of available evidence to help better understand how collections influence what people do and how much food is wasted); and

• Example communications schedule for those with no food waste collections and those with new food waste collections.

Find out more about WRAP’s new food waste communication templates or read more about audience participation in Resource70.