Students at Swavesey Village College welcomed world-renowned environmentalist Professor David Bellamy OBE who was at the college to open a new Environmental & Global Research Centre.
The centre, supported by Cambridge Consultants will be used as a teaching room for students with integrated resources that demonstrate the advantages of sustainable living.
Whilst touring the college, Professor Bellamy was able to learn about a food waste project, funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) under its Public Sector Food Procurement Initiative, which aims to encourage public bodies to use the £2 billion they annually spend on procuring food and catering services to promote efficient, health and sustainable food systems.
Mike Carr, Senior Adviser in the Natural Resources and Rural Development Team at the Government Office for the East of England said:
'Food waste is a massive problem. For instance, we throw away 4.4 million untouched apples every day in the UK and in Cambridgeshire around 36 per cent of the waste landfilled is food waste. If this waste could be composted, it would significantly reduce the amount going to landfill, which produces the potent greenhouse gas methane, and therefore adds to the impacts of climate change. Also, with the real possibility of global food shortages as the world's population grows, we need to be a lot cleverer about the use of our available food. I am delighted that Swavesey Village College has been able to participate in this project and am looking forward to reading about their results.'
According to WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) the average family discards £610 worth of food each year, and most of this is thrown into the rubbish bin rather than the compost bin. Annually this amounts to 5.9 million tones of food, representing a cost to the UK population of around £10 billion.
And in Cambridgeshire RECAP (the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Waste Partnership) will be working hard to raise awareness of this issue over the coming months, launching a Love Food Hate Waste campaign in early 2009.
