Swadlincote, a market town in south Derbyshire, has won £1m from Sainsbury’s to invest in finding ways to halve household food waste.
The supermarket will work with community groups and the local council next year to test ideas such as growing mushrooms in used coffee grounds, using artificial “noses” that detect whether food is safe to eat and introducing community cook-ups to find new ways of using unwanted food.
Families in Swadlincote could save a collective £1.2m a year by reducing food waste, Sainsbury’s said, and local people would contribute to a book designed to inspire other places to adopt some of the ideas. The town beat 189 rival towns and cities that applied to take part in the trial.
Sainsbury’s plans to spend £10m over the next five years to promote similar schemes. Mike Coupe, the chief executive, said: “Food waste is one of society’s biggest environmental issues at the moment and there is a genuine passion across the UK to tackle it.”
The move comes as supermarkets face increasing pressure to tackle food waste. Last week campaigners dumped skips full of waste food outside the headquarters of Sainsbury’s and Tesco and delivered a petition signed by more than 190,000 people urging them to reduce waste in their supply chains.
The Stop the Rot campaign group wants supermarkets to cut waste at stores and factories by at least 30% by 2025. It is also calling for funds to measure food waste on farms by 2018, so targets can be set for that too.
The campaign is backed by celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who highlighted supermarket waste in his BBC show Hugh’s War on Waste last month.
Just over 1% of food wasted in the UK – 200,000 tonnes – comes from stores, according to figures released this year by the government-backed Waste Resources Action Programme. Of the estimated 15m tonnes of food thrown away in the UK each year, more than half is disposed of in people’s homes.
In June, Labour MP Diane Abbott tabled an early-day motion calling on the government to introduce legislation that would ban supermarkets from discarding food that is approaching its best-before date. Instead they would have to make it available to charities.
In October, Marks & Spencer launched a scheme to distribute thousands of tonnes of surplus food from its 500 UK stores to local charities, including food banks. Tesco started a similar scheme in June in partnership with the redistribution charity FareShare.
