The Three R's

Households in the UK throw away 7.3million tonnes of food every year, according to figures from The Food Foundation.[1] That would be scandalous even if the same report did not then go on to state that there are 8.4million people living in UK households who reported having insufficient food in 2014. Add to these figures the amount of perfectly edible food grown and harvested by farmers but rejected by supermarkets on aesthetic grounds (knobbly carrots, misshapen parsnips, and the like) and it is clear that something is wrong.

These vegetables failed to win the supermarket beauty contest and were discarded. Picture: BBC

We used to think of The Three R's as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Now, they are just as commonly reduce, reuse, and recycle, and when it comes to reducing waste, we are implored to buy and use less. If we are throwing out over seven million tonnes of food each year, then plainly that message is not getting through. Clearly, one reason we throw out so much food is that we buy more than we can eat and any time I am in a supermarket I see shoppers with trolleys piled high with food that I doubt will all get consumed, but the supermarkets do little to discourage food waste. There are the multibuy offer and the Buy One, Get One Free (BOGOF) deals, which encourage consumers to buy more than they need or can use on the spurious premise that they are getting a bargain.

And it isn't getting any better. ASDA have provoked much criticism recently following their decision to remove loose fruit and vegetables from some of their stores, meaning that if a customer wants to buy carrots, they will have to buy a 500gram bag rather than one of two of them loose, if that is all they want. ASDA's rationale for this was, "After analysing customer buying habits we decided to trial removing some loose produce items from our stores where our research showed customers preferred buying in packs." Whether that is true or not - and it may be that customers prefer to buy packs either because they are too lazy to bag up some loose fruit and veg, or the bagged product is all that is available - it does not help reduce waste, nor does it help the customer who only wants one carrot, or one apple.

ASDA's decision to discontinue selling loose vegetables provoked an inevitable backlash on social media.

 

All of that additional, superfluous packaging is one of the reasons why we have four wheelie bins by our back door, not just the single dustbin that my parents had years ago. I will accept that a lot of what we throw away gets recycled, although that still does not address the fact that a lot of what we recycle we did not need in the first place. Buy any sort of domestic item,  be it a sofa or a dishwasher, a nest of tables or an oven, and it all comes swathed in layers and layers of polystyrene, bubble wrap, cardboard and paper. It didn't used to be like this.

Annoyingly, there is so much that we buy that is disposable that cannot be recycled. Coffee cups, soft drinks bottles and tubes of crisps are just three items that have been in the news because of the issues with recycling. Take-away coffee cups are notorious, because while many people will put them in the recycling, they are not recyclable - and we throw away 2.5billion every year, or 5,000 every minute, if you prefer. Our take-away cups might be made from card, but they are fused with polyethylene, a material that cannot be removed at a recycling plant. And it isn't even as if the cups are made from recycled material, the design requires them to be made from virgin paper pulp. What makes matters worse is that some coffee shops - an example would be one of my local Starbucks - now serve all drinks, whether you consume them in-store or not, in take-away cups, presumably to cut down on their washing up.

Meanwhile, Lucozade bottles cannot be recycled as the bottle is covered in a polymer shrink wrap, and Pringles cartons are made from cardboard but have a metal lining, metal base, foil and paper strip and plastic lid. As Simon Ellin, chief executive of trade body the Recycling Association, said  "What idiot designed this in terms of recyclability?" Empty Pringles cartons can be reused in many innovative ways, for storage in particular, so better reuse than attempting to recycle, I think.

Recycling is not as straight-forward as one would hope even when an item is supposedly 100% recyclable anyway. We all will have experience the recycling instructions on food containers in particular that may mean the cardboard sleeve goes in the recycling but other bits of the packaging don't, and some people have fallen foul of local council restrictions when they move from an area where an item is recyclable to an area where it isn't. Yoghurt pots are a particular culprit, apparently, being recyclable in some boroughs, but not in others. When it comes to things like batteries, print cartridges and light bulbs - especially the new style, low-energy bulbs - then you can neither through them out in the general waste, nor put them in the recycling. Which is where I had a bit of a problem last week.

Neither cheap nor easy to dispose of, low energy bulbs are widely disliked.

On Monday of last week (15th May) I took some batteries and light bulbs to recycle at my local Tesco store at the multi-purpose recycling unit. The batteries went straight through the unit and rolled out onto the floor. The same happened with the light bulbs, which of course smashed. Apart from the obvious hazard presented by shards of broken glass, there is also the small matter of the various substances such as mercury, lead, cadmium or sodium these bulbs contain and which are potentially hazardous and damaging to the environment. I went to Customer Services and reported it: I was told that it would be dealt with. Two days later I went back to Tesco, and being curious, checked to see if the debris had been cleared - it hadn't so I reported it again. Come Friday, when I next went to the store, it still had not been cleared up, so I reported it again. Nor had it been cleared up on the next day, by when I had given up on the in-store Customer Services, and reported it online, which proved effective, even if it was over a week after I first reported the matter in the shop before the batteries and broken bulbs had been removed.

Under the recycling bin, something nasty stirred.

I read somewhere - typically, I cannot now remember where - that when asked, more people claim to conscientiously recycle than actually do, and when there are complicated Do's and Don'ts about what can and cannot be recycled, when there are obstacles placed in our way, or - as I found at Tesco - when the recycling experience is frustrating - people are discouraged from doing so.

But should we do all we can to Reuse, Recycle and Reduce? Unequivocally yes, even -or perhaps especially - if it takes a bit of effort to do so.

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[1] See http://foodfoundation.org.uk/too-poor-to-eat-8-4-million-struggling-to-afford-to-eat-in-the-uk/