In my initial tutorial, it was recommended that I watch Hugh's War on Waste, a documentary about Britain's waste, from food waste to clothing waste. I finally got round to watching the whole series last night and found it really quite enlightening.
The first programme focused on the supermarket's cosmetic standards for fresh grown vegetables. They have strict rules on the size and shape of each vegetable to be suitable for sale. In the programme, Hugh found that supermarkets such as Morrisons believed that consumers wouldn't buy vegetables they didn't fit their specific cosmetic standards. Therefore all the fresh vegetables that didn't fit the rules were simply left the rot in huge piles because the farmers couldn't sell them. Even though all of the vegetables were perfectly edible.
This shocked me because there are so many people who struggle to pay for food and go hungry, yet perfectly good vegetables are going to waste in huge piles like above in every harvest. By the end of the series we were shown that there have been more tolerance and lessening of restrictions on grown vegetables due to a petition but out at the time of the show. Due to this many supermarkets, today have "wonky veg" packets where they will now sell vegetables that would have otherwise been rejected. However, this is only for vegetables like potatoes, carrots, parsnips and onions. There is still a huge issue surrounding this with other grown vegetables. It does show however that the consumer is the one who has power over these things, if we don't express interest for them then they won't be sold.
Another thing mentioned was food waste from our own households. Approximately a third of all the food we buy gets thrown in the bin without being used at all. This can only be solved through people making a more conscious effort not to buy more food than they need. As well as not throwing things away prematurely.
However, the thing that shocked me the most was about take away coffee cups. Everyone, including me, presumes that they are recyclable because they are paper cups - why wouldn't they be able to be recycled? But this is one of the coffee industries biggest secrets. They're not at all recyclable. In fact, they are horrifically unsustainable. I found out that coffee cups are actually coated a with a plastic (polyethylene) coating on the inside of the cup in order to stop liquid from penetrating the paper. This stops the cups being able to be pulped in the usual way paper would be recyled as the plastic clings to the paper and gets mixed up in the pulp. What is worse is that because there are exposed seams in coffee cups the paper that is used to make them has to be virgin - meaning that new paper from trees must be used. Resulting in the paper for a single purpose, only to then be thrown away into a landfill. In fact, 2.5 million cups are thrown away, and only 1% of those cups get recycled. In the program, Hugh found only one recycling plant in the UK that could recycle these cups. And this was just a trial system.
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