100 signatures reached
To: Plymouth City Council
Recycle food waste in Plymouth
We would love Plymouth City Council to introduce food waste collection in Plymouth by December 2018. Most of Devon recycles food waste - why can't we!
Within the Plymouth Labour manifesto the party said:
""We will review all options, including trialing food waste collection and reintroducing home composting, to tackle the problems arising from the Conservative’s scrapping of weekly bin collections. "
Let's get behind our city council and show them we want our food waste collected too!
Why is this important?
In the UK the average family throws away 22% of their weekly shop, which is worth £700 per year. Food waste is really, really bad for the environment. It takes a land mass larger than China to grow the food each year that is ultimately never eaten – all to produce food that we then just throw away. In addition, food that is never eaten accounts for 25% of all fresh water consumption globally.
Not only are all of the resources that went into creating the uneaten food wasted (land, water, labour, energy, manufacturing, packaging, etc), but when food waste goes to landfill, which is where the vast majority of it ends up, it decomposes without access to oxygen and creates methane, which is 23x more deadly than carbon dioxide.
Every which way you look at it food waste is a major culprit in destroying our planet, and in fact if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the USA.
So, the bad news is we are half the problem. But the good news is….. this means we can be half the solution!
Ref: https://olioex.com/food-waste/the-problem-of-food-waste/
