4 Apr 2017
Staff encouraged to get involved with reducing food waste
The University’s Sustainability team is looking for volunteers to support food waste reduction in staff kitchens.
Research undertaken at Loughborough has explored how to reduce food waste in manufacturing – but how can everyone play a part in helping to reduce the food waste produced on campus?
For the last six years, the University has been segregating food waste on campus for catering operations, student halls and conference facilities, and more recently students in self-catered halls have been encouraged to do the same.
In that time over 1240 tonnes of food waste has been diverted from landfill – around 9500 full wheelie bins each year.
By segregating food waste in academic and professional services buildings, the University can potentially save a further 50 tonnes of waste from landfill each year.
Why is segregating food waste important?
- It saves money – it costs less to send food waste to anaerobic digestion than to landfill
- It helps the environment – when food waste breaks down in landfill it produces methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2
- It recovers energy – by segregating food waste we can recover the energy as well as use the by-product as fertiliser
- It improves the quality of other waste streams – food waste can contaminate recycling streams and it also makes it harder to recover the value from general waste and divert this from landfill
How you can help
Staff can help by volunteering to be responsible for emptying an additional food waste bin in their department’s kitchen. A wheelie bin would be placed at a designated point outside of the building, where the food bin will need to be emptied once full. The wheelie bin will be emptied three times per week.
If you are interested in getting involved, please email the Sustainability Team at environment@lboro.ac.uk
The University also supports Love Food Hate Waste and promotes the campaign to students in halls of residence every year.
If you haven’t already, get yourself the reusable Loughborough Cup, which comes with vouchers and discounts on your coffee.
Additional information on waste is available on the Sustainability website.