More than 15 million school dinners will have to be thrown out under another UK national lockdown, it has been warned.
Schools will be forced to discard food that had been ordered in advance of schools opening back up.
In Scotland, schools had been scheduled to return on January 18 however First Minster Nicola Sturgeon announced yesterday that schools would be closed for the whole month and reopen at the start of February.
In England Boris Johnson said schools would remain closed longer, until the February half term.
National waste collections company BusinessWaste.co.uk is tasked with collecting the mountains of "perfectly good although ultimately perishable food."
Spokesperson Mark Hall took aim at the UK Government, saying: "This is a national disaster, the government have well and truly let the schools down.
"They have allowed them to open and prepare for the weeks ahead, which of course means stocking the fridges high for this weeks school dinners and now those dinners are going in the bin.
"The schools simply don't have the freezers required to store all the perishable food and that unfortunately will mean the vast majority is to be thrown away.
"The amount of food waste caused by a sudden lockdown is staggering - if they had been given warning then it could have been sent to other places, but now food banks will be over whelmed and they typically only take non perishable goods"
BusinessWaste.co.uk said three million school meals are served each day, each costing £2 and they are typically ordered a week in advance.
The spokesperson added that the vast majority of schools did not have dedicated food waste bins, which could divert the food waste to an anaerobic digestion plant and said that instead, it will end up rotting in a landfill.
