FareShare has called on the government and industry to “do much more”, in a bid to stop needless food waste.
The charity, which takes unsold or unwanted good-to-eat food and redistributes it to a network of nearly 11,000 charities, called for a big drive to prevent food waste on the day it published new figures.
It revealed that between April 2020 and March 2021, it redistributed over 55,000 tonnes of food to people in need.
This equates to 132 million meals, or four meals per second.
“These figures show the scale of just how many people have been struggling to get enough to eat, during the last year,” FareShare chief executive Lindsay Boswell said.
“Our warehouses, staff, volunteers and our network of charities have been working flat out, to support the millions of people and families who are going hungry. But just because the lockdown is easing, doesn’t mean people won’t still be struggling.”
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FareShare head of marketing James Persad added: “What many people don’t realise is that food waste is a huge contributor to global warming,”
“It accounts for at least eight per cent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s around three times pre-Covid levels of emissions from the aviation industry.”
According to Persad, about a third of all the food produced in the world is wasted each year.
In the UK alone more than two million tonnes of food are good-to-eat, when it is thrown away.”
Over one third of FareShare’s food is now delivered from the Surplus with Purpose scheme, which takes irregular shaped produce and redistributes it where it otherwise would have been wasted.
The charity hopes that to see the program taken up around the country as the UN Food Summit and COP26 approach later this year.
