You see, Food waste isn’t just about a stinking fridge or dustbin. It is about a lot of useless carbon footprint generation and some serious environmental impact too! The extent is so much that if the corporate world is able to reduce the food waste they generate on a daily basis, a 5 point reduction in it can result in an atleast 15 point reduction in the overall carbon footprints generated by them. There are also some other ways to reduce carbon footprints , that we will discuss later.
Food is the number one item that ends up in landfills, according to the Save The Food campaign initiated by the Ad Council and the Natural Resources Defense Council in April 2016. Currently, 40 per cent of the food in the U.S. goes unconsumed. When you consider the “cost of food wasted at the consumer level, retail, wasted water, energy, fertilizers, cropland, and cost of production,” the study says, that translates to $218 billion lost.
Maybe even worse, it releases methane gas, and even more active greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, as food in landfills decomposes.
All the more incentive to reduce your Office’s food waste. It can seem like a daunting challenge, given the ingrained behaviours of most workplaces, but having a few changes will help change the office culture.
Ways to reduce food waste in offices
Here are 10 ways to reduce food waste in offices.
- Raise Awareness
Step one to reduce food waste in offices is being conscious of reducing food waste. According to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Food Waste Toolkit for the Office, most food waste happens before it even hits our plate. It occurs at lunchtime when you throw out the homemade salad that is less appealing once your team orders pizza.
Making deliberate choices. Choosing the pizza is OK, but commit yourself to eat the salad for dinner. Side advantages include saving money by not eating out too much and making better decisions, maybe.
Keeping a Food Waste Week office-wide. It’s also a great way to call out the associated environmental goals of your company.
To spearhead the campaign, find a food-waste champion That individual can coordinate activities. For fact sheets, applications, blogs, and other tools, the Food Waste Toolkit is a fantastic resource that will get people to think about how much food they waste in the workplace.
Your champion will integrate the data into various events that make it enjoyable, with prizes and games, such as food-waste trivia or a leftovers recipe competition. To help workers gain a bit of insight into food insecurity, you might even want to arrange an off-site visit to a food bank.
2. Compost!
Although some cities have compulsory composting of food, most do not. Many offices have different bins for garbage, cans, bottles, and paper these days, but few have a bin for composting food scraps to throw in. Consequently, the landfill ends up with millions of banana peels, apple cores, stale doughnuts, and other leftovers.
According to Sustainable America, “workplace composting can not only contribute to the corporate social responsibility policy of a company, but it can also reduce waste collection costs, engage staff, boost morale, and promote healthy lifestyle practices.”
If your town or county does not support compost collection, you can still set up your composting system. Gardeners will be delighted to take the compost you produce from your Office or your nearby community garden and thus, helping you to reduce food waste in offices. To Know more about composting you can follow our beginner guide related to composting.
3. Avoid single-use drink containers for guests.
The odds that these will be done and get into the recycling bin at the Office are slim, whether they are water or drink bottles or boxes. Half-full containers very frequently end up in the garbage instead, which is a waste of the drink and the bottle.
4. Bring lunches in reusable containers
As takeout boxes and containers ending up in the landfill, this alleviates unused food waste. Paper and paperboard make up 40% of all waste in industries, which means it is not recycled as it should be.
5. Get Rid of the K Cup Machine.
It’s not possible to recycle those millions of tiny plastic cups and go straight to the landfill. Since you can make one cup of coffee at a time, K-Cups can seem economical, but they are far more costly than coffee beans. For approximately $50, a pound of K-Cup coffee goes, while Starbucks is $12 a pound, and Dunkin is just $9 a pound. To produce one cup at a time, invest in a machine that grinds the beans
6. Using Reusable Water Bottles
Surprise and delight workers with a reusable bottle of water with the logo of your business on it. There’s a small expense associated with it, but eventually, when they take it outside the workplace, you’ll save on disposable water bottles, encourage health, and get free publicity. It is very important do so because plastic is very harmful for our ecosystem.
7. Clean and maintain your fridge.
A clean and well-functioning refrigerator keeps food fresher longer, allowing more time for people to consume it.
8. Have the office cafeteria go trayless
Studies have shown that the amount of food people take in cafeteria lines is decreased by going trayless, which reduces the amount of food they throw away afterwards.
9. Share the wealth
You may not want the leftover slice of pizza from last night, but everyone in your Office certainly would. Designate a community shelf in the office fridge.
10. Vegetables: Use the Stalks and the stemps too!
“From nose to tail” has been a common theme for now in the gastro-event scene. After all, pigs are not tenderloins on four legs, and many top chefs invite peers to join them at “cook tanks,” where they work together to build recipes that will make them less familiar parts of the animal more desirable to the masses. Thus, the food waste tragedy has become a culinary virtue, and the principle is easy to apply to other products: bones can be used to make a large stock until they fall in the garbage, for example. Finding new uses for vegetable scraps, too, is simple.
The elimination of food waste is a way of enhancing our climate in which we can all engage. In the workplace, there are innumerable ways to minimize waste. To see how simple it is and how much money you can save, follow these tips and reduce food waste in offices