Food Waste

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Mark Pawsey

Thursday 11th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy]

I am very pleased to see the hon. Lady in her place, not least because at the recent general election, the Greens campaigned in Bristol on the slogan: vote Green to “keep Labour honest”—so if she was not here today, who knows what nonsense I might come out with? However, she makes a valid point. I will speak later about how there has been so much focus on household food waste, but actually, this issue goes way back through the supply chain, as far as the dealings between farms and supermarkets.

Bermuda has recently passed legislation along the lines of the 1996 US legislation, the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which protects food donors and recipient organisations from civil and criminal liability when food has been donated in good faith. That was seen as important back then, because many potential donors and potential recipients were deterred by the fact that they might be held accountable if anything went wrong.

The excellent report of the all-party parliamentary inquiry into hunger in the UK, “Feeding Britain”, said that redistributing surplus food better would be the “next big breakthrough” in eliminating hunger in the UK. In particular, it recommended that food retailers and manufacturers should be set a target of doubling the proportion of surplus food that they redistribute to food assistance providers.

Last week saw the launch of the FareShare FoodCloud app, which will enable Tesco store managers to alert charities to the surplus food that they have at the end of each day. If a charity is interested in that food, it can get in touch and collect it free of charge. A surplus food summit organised by FareShare is taking place next week. It will promote the new tool and is aimed at inspiring suppliers to step up their own efforts to redistribute their food.

All that is very welcome, and it is the reason why I wanted to secure today’s debate. However, I want to go back to why reducing food waste is so important. We know that somewhere between 30% and 50% of all food globally is wasted. That surplus has an environmental footprint. It puts pressure on scarce land and resources, contributes to deforestation and needlessly adds to global greenhouse gas emissions. If food waste were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind the US and China. It is also unsustainable if we are to meet the global challenge of feeding a growing population from an increasingly scarce agricultural resource base. It is, of course, indefensible that good food is thrown away when so many are turning to food banks, because they cannot afford to feed themselves or their families.

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the hon. Lady for securing the debate; she and I have spoken at seminars on this matter. My take on the issue is slightly different from hers. She is right to focus on ensuring that good food becomes available to those who need it, but should a lot of the focus not be on preventing food from being surplus in the first instance? Will she acknowledge the role of the packaging industry in that sector in making sure that food is kept fresh for longer? Innovations can be brought in, such as the re-closable cheese pack, which means that once opened, cheese continues to be useable for longer than would otherwise be the case.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, and I remember the conference at which we both spoke. One of my critiques of the Courtauld targets, which I will come on to in a moment, was that food waste and packaging waste were lumped together, in terms of the need to reduce both at the same time. I remember the point being made that although we want to reduce food packaging, and a lot of food items are over-packaged—individually wrapped bananas, for example—packaging can actually play an important role in reducing food waste. To me, that further underlines the need to treat the two issues separately.

On food banks, I wanted to make the point quickly that although I entirely support the work of food banks and think they play a very important role, we do not want to go out of our way to facilitate the creation of more food banks. We cannot allow them to become a feature of our welfare system. When the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, visited the UK a couple of years ago, he warned:

“It is only when government fails that food banks have to step in.”

He said that important as food banks are,

“they are not a substitute for social policies that protect people.”

Therefore, although I am arguing for much greater support from supermarkets, manufacturers and other people who are in a position to donate the surplus food to charities, it does not mean that I accept the fact that we need so many food banks and other food distribution organisations in the UK. I would much rather that the need did not exist and that we could find other uses for the surplus food.

Although headlines last month claimed that the UK tops the chart of EU food waste—in other words, we are the worst at dealing with food waste—a fairer per capita comparison ranks the UK as fairly average, coming about 10th out of 28 countries based on the data that were available in 2012. Since I introduced my Bill back in 2012, we have started to see very welcome steps being taken voluntarily by the industry, with Asda, for example, saying that it would donate all its surplus to FareShare. Tesco has led the way by publishing its own independently audited food waste figures and the other big supermarkets are now following suit. There had been calls for mandatory food waste audits, but I am pleased to see that the supermarkets are taking a lead on that. It is an important first step towards the industry, as a whole, publicly reporting on its food waste and then using those data to take much more ambitious action to reduce food waste.

Much more of our surplus could be redistributed. FareShare, for example, currently provides food for 150,000 people a week, saving just under 2,000 charities £20 million a year. However, that is with only 2% of the food that could be donated to it; the vast majority of food waste is still turned into compost, using anaerobic digestion, or is discarded in landfill. FareShare says that if it were able to get its hands on 100,000 tonnes of surplus food—a quarter of the 400,000 tonnes fit for human consumption that are currently allowed to go to waste—it could save the voluntary sector up to £250 million a year. That would make surplus food the second-largest supporter of charities after the Big Lottery, so there is huge potential.

We have touched slightly on the fact that the Government have focused most of their attention on household food waste. Households continue to throw away the equivalent of six meals a week, although there have been steady reductions, with waste down 21% since 2007. Some of that has been driven by much greater consumer awareness and by the success of the excellent Love Food Hate Waste campaign, which is a treasure trove of ideas and advice on how to reduce household waste.

However, focusing on household food waste, which has also been the food industry’s lobbying position, largely ignores supermarkets’ contribution. Some statistics show that just 3% of food waste in the UK is generated by retailers in back of store, with manufacturers contributing 27%. However, as the food waste campaigner Tristram Stuart has pointed out, there is a big disparity in how food waste is measured by household and by industry. Household food waste includes waste that cannot be used, such as bones and peel, while retailers’ food waste often excludes waste that could be used. In addition, supermarket purchasing policies, such as demanding food free from visual imperfections, as well as forecasting errors and over-ordering, are responsible for lots of the food wasted on farms and by suppliers, although we still do not have an accurate picture of what food is wasted at that point in the supply chain.

[Mark Pawsey]

The hon. Lady was talking about household waste. A proportion of the household food that is thrown away is perfectly okay to eat, although it may have passed its sell-by or use-by date. Given that there is a lot of confusion in the minds of consumers about how long to keep food for consumption, would some clarification of those terms help?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I entirely agree. I was about to say that retailers make a contribution to food waste in the home. There is confusion over food that is labelled “best before” or “use by”. Many people do not understand those labels, and they think they will go down with food poisoning if they go anywhere near the time limits. Buy one, get one free offers on perishables, and packaging fruit and vegetables in multiple portions, rather than portions for one person, can also add to food waste.

The current lever for encouraging food businesses to reduce their waste—the Courtauld agreement, which is facilitated by WRAP—is voluntary and industry led. The industry set itself a very low voluntary target under phase 3 of Courtauld, which runs from 2013 to 2015. The target was to reduce household food waste by 5% by 2015 and to reduce manufacturing and retail waste by just 3%. The first year’s results show little change against that minuscule target, although signatories have reported a doubling in the food provided for redistribution. Those targets simply are not ambitious enough to drive the reduction that is needed. It should also be possible under Courtauld to see how well individual supermarkets and manufacturers are performing against the targets. At the moment, a composite result is announced, so we do not know who the good guys and the bad guys are. If companies were named and shamed, that would encourage the worst performers to follow the example set by the best performers.

There is also the problem that Government policies and subsidies, such as the landfill tax, incentivise less environmentally damaging forms of disposal over prevention and redistribution. We are therefore seeing the growth of anaerobic digestion, composting and refuse-derived fuel at the expense of prevention and donation.

I was deeply disappointed that Bristol City Council turned down the opportunity to become one of WRAP’s 10 food waste cities—a project that leads on preventing food waste. I am still struggling to find out why it turned that opportunity down, although it did tell me that it wanted to focus on composting. That suggests a worrying direction of travel, particularly given that Bristol is Europe’s green capital this year.

Much more needs to be done to enforce the waste hierarchy further up the pyramid, either through measures such as those in my Bill or through a system of financial incentives or penalties, as recommended by the House of Lords European Union Committee. In France, for example, fiscal instruments make it much more expensive for companies to send food to anaerobic digestion than to donate it to food banks. If the industry cannot drive the change that is needed, there is a need for Government action. The landfill tax, for example, was one of the most successful waste policies ever in terms of driving behaviour change and creating markets in more environmental forms of disposal, such as anaerobic digestion. However, there are no similar mechanisms to enforce the waste hierarchy further up the pyramid.

Should the UK introduce a Bill along the lines of the legislation in France? It has been said that the UK retail sector differs from the French sector in having less back-of-store waste, with such waste accounting for less than 2% of total food waste in the UK, compared with 11% in France. On the other hand, France manages to redistribute 20 times more food than the UK.

Concerns have been expressed that the French proposals could place an operational and logistical strain on charities, and questions have been asked about whether they would have the resources to handle any surplus. That is partly because the proposals in France were originally reported and misrepresented as placing an obligation on supermarkets to give away all their surplus. That gave the impression that they would be turning up at charities’ doors and forcing the staff to take food they did not want, which is not the case. The obligation is for supermarkets to put their best efforts into donating where there is a desire to take donations. The new FareShare FoodCloud app, which was launched last week, aims to have one common platform for charities, so that they do not have to deal with lots of different, and potentially competing, collection models.

Although legislation along the French lines might target only a small proportion of UK food waste, missing the much larger amount of waste in supermarket supply chains, and although such waste might not be the easiest to collect, it is symbolically important to embed redistribution in legislation. That would respond to the strong moral idea that food should not be thrown away when people are willing and able to take it.

My Food Waste Bill had a number of provisions, including a requirement on large food retailers and large food manufacturers to take steps to reduce food waste and to donate surplus food to charities for redistribution. If waste was not suitable for human consumption, it would, where legally permissible—EU rules prevent this in some cases—be made available for livestock feed rather than disposed of. There was also a good Samaritan provision in my Bill to protect food donors and recipient agencies from civil and criminal liability where food was donated in good faith.

At the time, the then Minster seemed interested in my proposals, but I was subsequently told that his Department had received advice that they would be incompatible with European food safety laws. I have since had a legal firm look into the issue, and it rejected that assessment, saying that any UK proposals would be okay as long as they closely resembled laws introduced in Italy more than 10 years ago. There is now less of a clamour for a good Samaritan provision in the UK, and legal concerns do not seem to be cited as often as a reason for not donating. It may be that the example set in other places —Australia and New York have good Samaritan laws—has set people’s minds more at rest. However, such a provision could still play a useful role in, for example, helping charities to access dairy products that, although perhaps one day out of date, would still be very much fit for purpose, or in redistribution from catering surpluses. I have heard from the Sustainable Restaurant Association and others involved in large-scale catering of huge amounts of food going to waste when a big buffet is put on at, say, a wedding, because food safety laws and concerns about health and safety mean that that food cannot be donated.

The Groceries Code Adjudicator has certainly helped to address some of the supermarkets’ unfair business practices, which were creating waste further up the supply chain. Those include the notorious take-back arrangements, which forced suppliers to take back produce supermarkets had failed to sell and meant they received no money. However, even though the Groceries Code Adjudicator is in place, suppliers continue to report the last-minute cancellation of orders by supermarkets, which often use cosmetic standards as an excuse, because order cancellations are no longer allowed. That is often done through a middleman, making it difficult for the adjudicator to take action. Indirect suppliers can bring complaints, but those are insufficient to launch an investigation. I therefore ask the Government to review this evident weakness in the adjudicator’s power so that supermarkets cannot get round the law in this way.

The details of Courtauld phase 4 are currently being worked out to cover the period 2016 to 2025 and I have some suggestions to put to the Minister. Will Courtauld phase 4 include food waste on farms? Will it require big supermarkets to report food waste transparently—a path that, as I have mentioned, some are already starting down—or will it continue with the current system where data are reported to the British Retail Consortium, which reports a composite figure? What will the targets be? Will we be looking at another 3 percentile, or will they be equal to meeting the challenge of one of the proposed sustainable development goals of halving per capita global food waste by 2030?

We must continue to consider regulation if the industry cannot deliver a more ambitious voluntary target. I understand that at the Stockholm food forum earlier this month the food companies that were present said they would welcome legislation to achieve that goal and ensure a fair playing field in doing so. I will be getting together soon with the various people who were involved in discussions about my Food Waste Bill of 2012, and revisiting it for 2015 to think about its possible revival and potential revisions or additions. I hope that if we decide to present another ten-minute rule Bill the Minister will give it serious consideration.

Food Waste

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Mark Pawsey

Wednesday 24th April 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I secured the debate to highlight the importance of packaging materials in reducing food waste. I acknowledge that the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), whom I am pleased to see in her place, introduced the Food Waste Bill last March. She began and has continued a campaign to ensure that food that is safe to use but not saleable by supermarkets and manufacturers is donated to charities. My remarks will consider a slightly different side of the debate on food waste, focusing on how food waste can be reduced, and particularly the role that packaging can play in achieving that objective.

Many of my remarks will be based on the Fresher for Longer campaign, launched a month or two ago by the Packaging Federation, to whose chief executive, Dick Searle, I pay tribute. That body worked in conjunction with the Kent Waste Partnership under its manager, Paul Vanston, and alongside WRAP UK, the British Retail Consortium and the Food and Drink Federation. The campaign was launched on 5 March to show how packaging not only protects food from damage but can keep it fresher for longer in our homes, meaning that less food is wasted. The campaign has caught the public’s attention. On the day when it was launched, it trended at No. 1 on Twitter, beating the pop star Justin Bieber to top spot.

Why are the campaign and this debate so necessary? One key finding of research for the Love Food Hate Waste campaign was that only 13% of the public realise that packaging can play an important role in protecting food in the home. The campaign attempts to deal with some public perceptions.

To start with the extent of the problem, food waste represents a significant cost to all consumers. Throwing away food not used in time costs £6.7 billion a year, which is £270 a year to the average household or £5 a week, a significant sum at a time when many household budgets are stretched. Many families would rather not bear that burden, which is unnecessary in many cases. I hope to show how packaging can help reduce that cost, but to do so, we must change perceptions.

The Fresher for Longer campaign found that 61% of consumers believe that keeping fruit and vegetables in their original packaging makes them sweat and go off more quickly, when actually the opposite is true. In a 2011 article published in Food Science and Technology, Dr Paul Butler points out that only about 19% of food waste is unavoidable, consisting of things such as meat and fish bones, peelings, eggshells and banana skins, meaning that 81% of food waste is avoidable. Why is that proportion so high? Dr Butler concludes in his article that

“the core problem is that consumers have largely lost touch with food; what it is, where it comes from and how it is produced. They perceive that food is cheap and plentiful and can be wasted without any thought as to the consequences”.

There is concern that the average shopper does not know how to treat different foods. Should bananas be put in the fridge? The answer, of course, is no. Should cucumbers be taken out of polythene wrap? No. What should people do with cheese once they have opened it? They should put it back into a resealable pack. The lack of such knowledge is damaging the environment and, crucially, people’s pockets. The quantity thrown away amounts to 7.2 million tonnes of food and drink every year, which the campaign says is enough to fill Wembley stadium nine times over. Of that amount, 4.4 million tonnes would have been safe to eat. In addition, the food wasted produces 17 million tonnes of CO₂, the amount produced by one fifth of all cars in the UK. It is a pretty substantial problem.

One of the most worrying statistics is that many people believe that the disposal of packaging is a problem bigger than or equal to food waste. A quick look at some statistics shows just how wrong that presumption is. The CO₂ emissions from food thrown away are 166 million tonnes, while the CO₂ emissions from the packaging amount to just 10.8 million tonnes. That is one fifteenth of the amount, a massive difference. The consequences of using packaging are not nearly as dangerous to the environment as those of food waste.

In 2008, the Advisory Committee on Packaging found that, of the total energy used in the food chain, approximately 50% is used in food production, 10% in transport to the shops and retailing, 30% is used by shoppers driving to the shops and storing and cooking food, and just 10% in making the packaging. The case gets stronger. The Love Food Hate Waste campaign points out that the impact on the environment of throwing away an apple is six times greater than that of the pack it comes in; for tomatoes, it is 30 times greater; for lettuce, it is 100 times greater.

As well as making delivery of products effective, packaging can help prolong the life of our foods. Increasingly, food is produced at some distance from where it is consumed, so packaging is critical to ensuring that it survives the journey from production to consumption. Without packaging, fruit and vegetables would not be available out of season, and consumers would have to grow their own food or shop for it daily.

The Advisory Committee on Packaging draws attention to the fact that selling grapes in trays or bags has reduced in-store waste of grapes by 20%. In-store wastage of new potatoes decreased from 3% when sold loose to less than 1% after specially designed bags were introduced. An unwrapped cucumber loses moisture and becomes dull and unsaleable within three days. Just 1.5 grams of wrapping will keep it fresh for 14 days, which shows how much difference the smallest amount of packaging can make.

The Co-operative Group provides retail experience of the benefits of packaging cucumbers. It switched from wrapped to naked—their word, not mine—cucumbers in 2007, but says that

“we have now reintroduced plastic wrapping to cut food waste and ensure cucumbers look fresh. We expect that the move will save 56 tonnes of food waste a year”.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

As the hon. Gentleman said, I introduced a Food Waste Bill a year ago, but he is discussing a new dimension of the issue. It is interesting to listen to him. He might be aware that phase 2 of the Courtauld commitment, which set targets for reducing food and packaging waste, is coming to an end. The target has been exceeded, although it was low in the first place. It seems to me from what he is saying that there is an argument for separating the targets for food waste and for packaging waste, and that it would be wrong to try to bundle up the two in one target. Does he agree?

[Mark Pawsey]

That is a very sensible comment. I will argue later that packaging waste can be treated as a valuable resource. I have great sympathy with the hon. Lady’s remarks.

The environment and the consumer can benefit from packaging; extending the shelf life of our food is a significant way in which to reduce food waste. Using appropriate packaging can help in three ways: first, as I have already mentioned, through the protection of food in transit. The average household in the UK buys more than 4,000 items of food and other products every year; in the country as a whole, 25 million households buy more than 100 billion items, and more than 75% of those purchases are grocery products, mainly food and drink but also household detergents, paper products, cosmetics, etc. To meet that demand, a typical supermarket today carries considerably more than 50,000 product lines, compared with only 2,000 in the 1960s, so a much broader range of products needs to be distributed, often from much further afield. Those products have to survive the journey from farm or factory to the consumer in an undamaged and unspoilt condition; if food arrives damaged, that only serves to increase the amount of food wasted. Primary packaging protects products, while secondary packaging is the cardboard boxes and trays that are used to group the products together during distribution.

A second role of packaging is to prolong life, and the third is to inform consumers about the contents of the pack, which is fundamental to the Love Food Hate Waste campaign. The campaign website has hints and tips about how consumers can store products effectively. It even includes a section offering poems and rhymes as a different technique to remind consumers how to store food; I shall quote one about bread:

“Don’t get in a spin

it really is no teaser

clip half your bag in a bread bin

and the other half in the freezer.”

That is a good way to get a message across: bread can be preserved by putting half the loaf in the freezer, so that it can be used later.

In response to such ideas and demands, the packaging industry has produced a number of new types of pack. One way in which it has dealt with bread is through smaller packs; fridge packs allow baked beans to last longer once they are opened; and a great deal of packaging is now subdivided, sometimes almost into individual portions, so that the consumer can use some now and some later, which is common for salads and sliced meats. The packaging industry has made significant strides in reducing food waste. It has further innovated by introducing items such as zip locks on cheese packs or breathable fruit and vegetable bags.

The Fresher for Longer campaign, on its website, points out eight ways in which packaging can assist in reducing the amount of food that is thrown away. Some simple ones include: carrots, peppers and apples being best kept in the bag in which they were originally supplied, because such packaging is specifically designed to keep the product fresher for longer; resealable packs for cheese to prevent it drying out; and, during the production process, the air inside salad containers often being modified to enable the salad to remain fresher for longer in fridges by slowing down decomposition, giving customers a longer time in which to eat it.

Consumers can be informed not only through websites but through the packaging itself, which can play a vital role in advising and informing them how to handle their food. The nature of packaging enables producers to communicate with consumers. Some of the ways in which innovative food producers are taking advantage of that facility of packaging include: removing “display until” dates, so that the “best before” and, most importantly, “use by” dates are easier to see; giving flexibility for some products to be used after the date, for example, hard cheeses having a “best before” date rather than a “use by” date; highlighting on the front of the pack where to store food to keep it at its best, as many are doing, with most food packs having detailed storage advice; and moving away from guidance that tells consumers to “freeze on day of purchase” to “freeze before the use by date”, so that if food is purchased, kept in the fridge and not eaten, it can be frozen before the date in order to be used later. All such initiatives help reduce food waste and show that the food production and packaging industries are being proactive.

The packaging industry has also subscribed to the process of packaging optimisation, to make certain that less material is used in packaging. There have been substantial reductions in the amount of material used, for example in the production of a coke can or cardboard box. Packaging, therefore, has significantly less impact on the environment than many would have us believe. At the end of its life, packaging makes up less than 20% of household waste, amounting to less than 3% of materials going to landfill.

I hope that through today’s debate I have been able to provide an additional perspective to that of the hon. Member for Bristol East on the campaign to reduce food waste. I hope that I have been able to show how packaging is a vital component of, and not a hindrance to, the campaign, and how it provides valuable economic, social and environmental assistance to our society. I look forward to Minister’s response.