It’s Recycling Week, an annual event aiming to motivate more people, to recycle more of the right things, more often. This year’s theme is ‘Let’s Get Real’ and aims to challenge perceptions and myths around recycling, and target contamination to improve recycling behaviours.

Food waste is an integral part of the recycling agenda, due to the staggering amounts being produced. WRAP estimates 6.6 million tonnes of household food waste is thrown away in the UK each year resulting in nearly 25 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, equivalent to 5.4% of the UK’s territorial emissions. The majority, 4.5 million tonnes, is food that could have been eaten and is worth approximately £14bn (or £60 a month for an average UK family).

We all need to ‘get real’ if we are going to combat these sombre numbers and that includes those in Westminster and the new PM.

Government legislation

The Environment Act 2021 is the Government’s way of dealing with the large amounts of food waste. It requires any recyclable household waste (including food) to be collected separately, and to be recycled. It was supposed to have come into force by now but changes in Westminster have resulted in it being delayed.

Currently around 40% of authorities already collect food waste, leaving the rest facing the challenge of deciding how to amend their current collection service to accommodate weekly food recycling. It presents big challenges in logistics, providing supporting infrastructure and the costs of collecting food waste in a different bin (purchase of the bins and vehicles and bin men to name a few).

Not only do we need to ‘get real’ in our personal recycling habits but the Government and the new Prime Minister need to ‘get real’ when asking local councils to implement this new legislation.

Most councillors would love to introduce the service, but it must be paid for. The Government has said that the net costs of introducing collections will be covered, but local authorities, who must save money year-on-year, need reassurance that this will happen. They cannot make cuts in other areas to pay for food waste collections.

Our elected officials in central Government, led by Liz Truss, must prioritise the Environment Act 2021 and unlock the funding needed to support local authorities to make these important changes.

Don’t wait

However, there is no need to wait for Government to force the hand of the local government.

Some local authorities have the power today to change their waste collection plans including introducing a separate food waste collection. Separate collections are the best way to educate residents on how much food they are throwing away each week.

North East Lincolnshire Council (NELC) rolled out a pilot scheme to collect food waste separately from almost 5,000 homes. This effort was so successful that the council is now planning to extend it to another 900 homes, showing people are willing to work towards a healthier planet if they are given the means to do so.

Other areas are also seeing the benefits of the scheme – Bracknell Forest collected and recycled 6,031 tonnes of food waste last year, preventing 3,719 tonnes of CO2e from entering the atmosphere. But what to do with the food waste once it’s collected?

Anaerobic digestion (AD) is the most sustainable process of recycling food waste. Not only does it turn those yucky peelings, leftovers and tea bags into green energy that goes back into the national grid, but it also produces biofertiliser, a nutrient-rich organic material used to fertilise farmland.

Food waste enters a building where it is processed into a liquid porridge, and then pumped into the anaerobic digestion plant. It is here that bacteria feed on the food waste, breaking it down to produce biogas. Biogas is captured and used as a fuel in Combined Heat and Power (CHP) units to produce renewable electricity and heat or cleaned and sent directly to the gas grid.

The waste is pasteurised to ensure that any pathogens are destroyed and the biofertiliser (digestate) is stored in large lagoons ready to be applied on farmland.

There are many benefits to AD – it’s a low-cost process with opportunities to make savings. In a recent report, the Anaerobic Digestion and Bioresources Association said that processing food waste at AD plants could save each local authority up to £1.8m annually, which will be a welcome figure to many budget holders.

AD is considered top of the hierarchy for food waste above other processes such as composting and it’s a positive step towards being more environmentally responsible as it provides a renewable form of energy.

Let’s get real

The goal of food waste collections for all households is a challenging one but a necessary one and the benefits are clear to see.

Getting real about recycling these volumes of food waste starts with a conversation to understand the what, where, when, how. We are working to change perceptions of food waste recycling and how small-scale recycling in the home to larger commercial recycling can benefit everyone. Which is why taking part in Recycling Week and other events including the recent RWM at NEC, LARAC and FOG Summit in October, help us all to get real.

Pamela Woolcock is group public sector lead, BioteCH.