21st April 2025
If I asked you, ‘What is food waste? I think most people would say scraps like carrot peelings, eggshells, onion skins and leftovers and you would be right: this certainly is food waste. However, what may not occur to you is that all food can end up as waste, including perfectly edible food like packets of crisps, loaves of bread or even tins of sweetcorn.
When it isn’t sold in time, edible food will go to anaerobic digestion, incineration or landfill. The last two are both terrible environmentally, as they create harmful greenhouse gas emissions. It is also bad for our society, especially when so many people are struggling to afford to put food on the table.
However, as of 31st March 2025 new ‘Simpler Recycling’ legislation should lead to a reduction in food waste from well being wasted! From that day, all business from retail to catering (except those with fewer than 10 full-time equivalent employees) will be required to separate out their food waste from their general waste. This will mean that more food is diverted from incineration and landfill to anaerobic digestion, where it can be turned into natural gas.
But why is The Felix Project getting excited? Well, there are a few reasons, first the environmental benefit. When food is thrown away it harms the planet firstly because the resources that go into growing, transporting and packaging the food are wasted and, secondly because if it ends up going to landfill or incineration it will emit further harmful greenhouse gases. ReLondon estimates that the 8% of food waste sent to landfill is responsible for 65% of disposal emissions. By segregating food waste, the likelihood of food ending up in landfill is significantly reduced.
But there is another way Felix could see a benefit and that is more food! If businesses, including the food industry, are forced to separate food waste and they see edible food in that pile they may think twice about where it goes. For example, if a wholesaler or warehouse has unsold food, that is close to best before. A caterer that has unused meal ingredients or a manufacturer that has rejected produce, all these unsold food examples could be donated for redistribution to people.
Rescuing edible food and prioritising it for redistribution to people is in line with Defra’s Food Waste Hierarchy. This document provides guidelines for anyone in the food industry. The first priority should be to reduce waste, the second priority is to redistribute edible surplus to people.
However, our research shows this is not being followed, in fact, a more realistic visual representation looks more like this, with just 1% of edible food waste currently being redistributed to people.
This sad reality needs to be addressed, and we hope food waste segregation will start to do this. It won’t happen overnight, and I am sure many retailers, suppliers and caterers may well struggle to cope with the new regulations. One thing that could help is reaching out to your local redistribution charity, such as The Felix Project.
Whatever the option, I urge anyone working with food, to not simply throw anything edible away with the “scraps”. With so many people struggling to afford food and so much harm done to our planet due to food waste, we must make sure these new regulations have the impact they should.
The Felix Project recently hosted a webinar about this topic, if you would like to watch it please click here.
