Food waste is such as prominent issue and looking back at the Food Recovery Hierarchy, after ‘source reduction’ the next aspect we should be concentrating on is ‘Feeding People In Need’. One amazing food rescue organisation that does just that is SecondBite.
SecondBite works by rescuing surplus fresh food that would otherwise go to landfill and redistributes this to communities and people in need. In 2015 SecondBite delivered 7 million kg of fresh food across Australia, enough food for nearly 40,000 healthy nutritious meals each day for vulnerable people and their children. Unfortunately the demand for the service continues to rise. More and more Australian families are struggling to find the food for their daily and weekly meals.
To give you an idea about the environmental impact; the amount of water saved by not sending seven million kilograms of food to landfill is equivalent to 273 fifty-meter Olympic swimming pools or a shower running for 18,095 days!*
On average, every kilogram of food recovered will avoid 2 kg of greenhouse gas (kg CO2-eq) emissions, and avoid the consumption of 143 litres of water.
KS Environmental feels strongly about food waste and believes landfill is unnecessary for our organic wastes. We are pleased to be able to donate our services in the way of food waste recycling collections Monday through to Friday to SecondBite. We provide 18 organic bin collections which collects the food waste that is unable to be redistributed.
There are lots of ways you can support SecondBite, visit their website to find out more. Or if you would like to find out more about food waste recycling programs please contact us.
*This LCA was amended from a project originally conducted for FareShare by O’Farell, K. ‘Sustainability Gains Through the Recovery of Unsold or Off-Specification Food’, Hyder Consulting, 2008.