Tag: Carbon footprint

Eco Tips

Curtailing food waste

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

Reducing food waste

4..5 million tonnes of food is wasted by UK households each year – that equates to 12.5 million tonnes CO2. Avoiding waste is about only buying what is actually going to be eaten within the shelf life of the food stuff.

  • Plan meals
    • plan a daily menu or a weekly menu. This way you will know what food/ ingredients you need.
    • think about portion sizes: eg portion of protein = 30g nuts, 2 eggs, 90g meat, or 150g cooked beans or pulses.
    • check which ingredients you already have and which additional items you need to buy.
  • Make a shopping list and use it: buying extra may be storing up future waste.
  • Think about using alternative or substitute ingredients.
    • if a recipe asks for peas and you haven’t any, can you use chopped courgette/ apple/ dried peas?
    • if celeriac is on your shopping list but not in the shop, can you buy carrots/ parsnips/ sweet potato instead?
  • Plan your meal according to what you already have.
    • Rather than buying a complete set of ingredients, create a recipe that uses what you already have.
    • Use up ingredients that are in your fridge that would otherwise go out of date. Try the internet for ‘fridge clearing’ recipes.
    • If you have left leftovers from a previous meal, incorporate them into today’s meal
  • Make good use of a glut. If you have an excess amount of a food or if there is a really good offer at your local shop, have a go at food preserving . Excess fruit can be bottled, made into jam, or made into chutney. Excess vegetables can be pickled, fermented or made into chutney.
  • Store all food stuffs carefully so as to keep them fresh and maintain their life. Some foods – like potatoes – are best kept in breathable (paper/ cotton) bag that excludes light. Some are best kept in bags – eg carrots and root vegetables – to stop them drying out. Some are best kept in the fridge such as cucumbers and lettuces. Some are best kept out of the fridge such as apples and tomatoes.
  • If you shop locally and buy locally produced foods, less food is likely to be wasted in the distribution chain. Try a fruit and veg box scheme that comes direct from the farm.
  • Be ready to buy small or oddly shaped fruit and vegetables that would otherwise be discarded. Some fruit and veg box schemes such as OddBox, specialise in sourcing products that are either small, misshapen or surplus to demand.
  • Buy and eat food that is in season.
  • Have a few recipes that use only store cupboard ingredients so that you can always make a meal with what’s in the house. Eg spaghetti with a tinned tomato and haricot bean sauce, garnished with black olives.

Green Tau: carbon footprints

Calculating your individual carbon footprint

The ongoing global climate crisis arise because human  activities and lifestyles

are putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a faster rate than this gas can be absorbed by the planet. The resulting increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere insulates the planet so that year on year average global temperatures are rising. This impact of human activity on the planet is termed our carbon foot print. The word conveys the idea that what we do each day is leaving a mark, a footprint, on the face of the earth. We can measure the carbon footprint of different activities eg cycling, driving a car, skiing or hiking. We can measure the carbon footprint of different products eg a book, a DVD, a litre of milk, a dozen eggs, a wooden jumper, or a pair of trainers. We can measure the carbon footprint of a household or a business, of a person living in a flat or medium sized estate agents, a supermarket or a hospital. We can compare the difference between the carbon footprint of a typical resident of Nepal and the typical resident of Norway. We can compare the difference between alternative modes of transport, alternative methods of farming, or between a range of land uses.

The average per capita carbon footprint for the UK (adjusted to include emissions relating to what we import) is 7.1 tonnes (2023) (1)

The Carbon Independent  and the Carbon Footprint websites both  offer a detailed on line footprint calculator which includes inputting the amount of electricity, gas, petrol etc that you use each year. 

https://www.carbonindependent.org/

A less detailed calculator is offered by the World Wild Fund 

https://footprint.wwf.org.uk/#/region

The simplest way of reducing our carbon footprint is to look at individual aspects of our lifestyle and see how in practical terms we can reduce our carbon consumption. To some extent we will be limited by factors outside our control. For example if we choose to travel by train we cannot decide which railways lines are powered by electricity and which rely on diesel engines (although we can press Network Rail and our government to address this). If we shop at Waitrose, part of our food footprint is linked to the carbon emissions of Waitrose’s operations (Waitrose’s aim is that their entire operation should achieve net zero by 2035). On the other hand we can make positive choices to use businesses that are carbon neutral. For example, Kiss the Hippo’s coffee roasting business is carbon negative. 

(1) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capita?tab=discrete-bar&time=latest&country=~GBR