UK supermarket waste hits new high

Susie Mesure, The Independent 10 Feb 08;

1.6m tonnes of food goes to landfill each year, sustainability watchdog reports

The Government must get tougher with supermarkets if it is to tackle Britain's growing mountain of food waste, a report on Labour's sustainable food policies will warn this week.

The warning comes amid growing concern at the amount of food that ends up as landfill rather than on people's plates. Retailers generate 1.6 million tonnes of food waste each year.

An influential watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), will condemn targets set by the Government's waste-reduction programme as "unambitious and lacking urgency". It will also say multi-buy promotions are helping to fuel waste and obesity in Britain. Speaking to The Independent on Sunday ahead of the report's publication on Saturday, Tim Lang, SDC commissioner, said it was "ludicrous" that the Government had not pressured retailers into setting tougher targets to cut waste.

Three years ago, the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) left it up to supermarkets to find voluntary "solutions to food waste" in an agreement dubbed the Courtauld Commitment. "The Government is frankly not using its leverage adequately. It really should toughen up on Courtauld, which must be enforced because this is ludicrous," said Mr Lang, who is also professor of food policy at City University, London.

The 18-month study, which found that "too many supermarket practices are still unhealthy, unjust and unsustainable", said Wrap should adopt a "more aspirational approach to reducing waste in food retail by setting longer-term targets and [supporting] a culture of zero waste".

Richard Swannell, Wrap's director of retail and organic programmes, defended the Courtauld goals, set in 2005. "We couldn't set a target for reducing food waste because we didn't know what the scale of the problem was," he said. Instead, Wrap focused on reducing packaging waste – though even here the SDC report called its progress too slow. Mr Swannell said Wrap intended to unveil targets on cutting food waste by the summer.

The report comes at a critical time for Wrap, which is facing budget cuts of 25 per cent. Last week the body, which is campaigning to get consumers to throw less food away, issued 31 redundancy notices. Steve Webb, Liberal Democrat environment spokesman, attacked the cuts. "It blows a hole in any credibility the Government has on the environment," he said.

A separate study by Imperial College for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, found that supermarkets preferred to throw away food that was approaching its sell-by date rather than mark it down in price. "The cost of staff time is greater than the money made on the reduced items," the research found, citing a supermarket executive who said it cost the chain £11m a year in labour and lost margins to slash prices.

Andrew Simms, author of Tescopoly: How One Shop Came Out on Top and Why it Matters, said: "Supermarkets need to persuade people to be more frugal."