The world is at a tipping point when it comes to waste. With a mushrooming world population, and a billion extra mouths to feed by 2025, we can't go on consuming, producing and wasting food in the same way. We need bold new solutions if it’s are to overcome this issue, says Nesta the UK’s innovation foundation.

Nesta, together with Cabinet Office, called for new ideas that would help reduce waste. Over 18 months, the Waste Reduction challenge prize developed 25 concepts – proposed from community groups to established charities – and piloted six in regions across the UK.

The piloted ideas included a 'rubbish diet' to slim people's bins,  a network that redirects supermarkets’ leftover stock to charities and a mobile kitchen that provide meals made from local surplus to people in need.

Awarded a prize of £50,000 for demonstrating the biggest effect in reducing waste, London-based Gleaning Network has devised an innovative solution to the problem of farm food wastage. During the pilot they diverted 36.74 tonnes of fruit and vegetables that would have been wasted to charities, providing over 183, 000 meals to beneficiaries.

In the future Gleaning Network expects to redirect more than 80,000 kg of produce per year to charities per year and more as the project develops.

Tris Dyson, director of Nesta’s Centre for Challenge Prizes, said: “The UK is only at the tip of the landfill when it comes to waste; we need to give some serious thought to this problem. The piloted initiatives have demonstrated that communities are keen to tackle the issue of waste.  These initiatives are already making a real difference to the community, we need to see more ideas like these rolled out across the UK”

Minister for Civil Society Nick Hurd said: “This challenge demonstrates just how much can be achieved when communities come together to tackle a big issue like this.  We’ve seen some truly outstanding innovation from all of the finalists, and I look forward to following the progress of the winning scheme as the project develops.”

On Thursday 5th December 3-10pm, Feeding the 5000 in collaboration with the People's Kitchen, will host a Pumping Pumpkin Peeling Party at Passing Clouds  in Hackney. Volunteers will chop up tonnes of pumpkins that would otherwise have been wasted so they can be donated to the charity Food For All , who will cook it up and distribute it to the homeless, hungry and financially challenged around London.

The chopping will be done to an exuberant mix of DJs playing music. Wonky fruit and vegetables will be glorified in a carnivalesque celebration of eccentric produce that doesn't usually make it onto supermarket shelves, just for being the "wrong" size or shape.


Inspired by the Disco Soup  movement which has been spreading across the globe, this will be the first event of its kind in London.


Volunteers will be chopping pumpkins saved from going to waste by Feeding the 5000's Gleaning Network UK, who earlier in November, gathered a group of volunteers to harvest over 11 tonnes of pumpkins and squash that would otherwise have been wasted from a single farm.

Up to 18,000 tonnes of pumpkin were thrown in Britain's bins after Halloween, estimates waste management company BusinessWaste.co.uk.  But this isn't just at consumer level. Pumpkins do not stop growing after Halloween, yet demand collapses after the festival. As a result, tonnes of pumpkins are simply left to rot back into the field or fed to livestock, as farmers cannot find a market to sell them. In this case, the pumpkins were also wasted for a variety of other reasons such as order cancellations by markets and seasonal migrant labour shortages.

In addition to this, factors such as cosmetic appearance (the pumpkins being too small, too big, or the wrong colour) can result in large amounts of food waste. Martin Bowman, UK gleaning coordinator for Gleaning Network UK, said "We encountered one pumpkin farmer who "outgraded" hundreds of thousands of pumpkins a year because of supermarkets' cosmetic standards. Whether these are more the consumer's or the supermarket's fault is up for debate."

The Soil Association estimates that 20% to 40% of UK fruit and vegetables are rejected on cosmetic grounds before they get to the consumer . The FAO estimates that food losses at farm level in Europe are roughly 20% for fruits and vegetables, and that the dominant cause of this is retailer cosmetic standards.




GLEANING NETWORK UK - Further Information

•    Over the past year, the Gleaning Network have already gleaned approximately 48 tonnes of produce, with over 200 volunteers across 18 gleaning days, and have recently launched new hubs around London, Kent, Sussex, Cambridge, Bristol and Manchester.
•    The massive potential for gleaning in the UK is illustrated by the US, where extensive gleaning networks already exist; for example, the Society of St Andrews has saved more than 164 million pounds of food for America's hungry since 1988, with over 400,000 volunteers . By 2010, it had a network of 900 growers  and ran an average of over eleven gleaning events, with 8-9 volunteers each every single day of the year, with overheads of about two cents per serving .
•    Further information on the Gleaning Network UK can be found online: http://www.feeding5k.org/gleaning.php

THE PEOPLE'S KITCHEN – Further Information
•    The People's Kitchen taking food surplus and cook it into beautiful banquets for all. They cook every Sunday at Passing Clouds, and have also launched cooking sessions in Brixton, Finsbury Park and New Cross.
•    Further information on the People's Kitchen can be found online: http://eathackney.com/2012/10/the-peoples-kitchen-passing-clouds-e8/ or by contacting David Latto on 07828691416.

FOOD FOR ALL – Further information
•    Food For All (FFA) is a registered charity based in London (also in other parts of the UK), which distributes over 1,000, spiritually enriched nutritionally balanced vegetarian meals,  to different groups of people, including the homeless, disadvantaged, financially challenged and the ‘needy' on a daily basis, for free!
•    For more information on Food For All, see: http://foodforall.org.uk/

PASSING CLOUDS – Further information
•    Passing Clouds, 1, Richmond Rd, London E8 4AA, United Kingdom
•    For more information, see: http://www.passingclouds.org/

FOOD WASTE – Further Information
•    Approximately 60% of UK food waste is estimated to occur in the supply chain itself, before food gets to the consumer .
•    The scale of losses induced by cosmetic standards was hinted at when during extreme UK weather conditions in the summer of 2012, when supermarkets temporarily relaxed their standards under pressure from the National Farmers Union . This saved an estimated huge "300,000 tonnes of produce" , and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
•    The Institute of Mechanical Engineers poll shows that "45% of people said that the appearance of fruit and vegetables doesn't matter; 26% said they would buy the cheapest option, and 10% said they would actively seek out and choose imperfect looking produce" .
•    Estimates of global food waste have been as high as 30  or 50%
•    The FAO estimates that every year, the production of food that is wasted generates "3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases" and uses up "1.4 billion hectares of land – 28 per cent of the world's agricultural area". Moreover, "globally, the blue water footprint for the agricultural production of total food waste in 2007 is about 250km3, which is more than 38 times the blue water footprint of USA households."
•    Preventing perfectly edible food from being wasted can also improve farmers' incomes, at a time when many farmers are struggling or going out of business. For instance, in the UK it has been estimated that "increasing the proportion of a farmer's crop that gets into the supermarket by just 5 per cent can increase the farmer's profit margins by up to 60 per cent" .