‘Recycle, the possibilities are endless’ as the old adverts used to tell us.
By sending your used metal cans, glass bottles and cardboard boxes for recycling, these materials can be turned into valuable new items and kept out of landfill, helping to protect our environment.
For many households in the United Kingdom, recycling these kinds of items has become an automatic part of our everyday lives.
But did you know that food waste can also be recycled in the same way?
Fruit and veg peelings on your chopping board, leftover chicken bones from dinner, or the empty shells left from your morning eggs – all of these inedible scraps might seem useless, but they can be transformed to make something endlessly useful.
Making something from nothing
Through a process called anaerobic digestion, food waste can be broken down to make biogas. This is used to make electricity or upgraded to create green gas that can heat our homes. The same food scraps that would have otherwise gone into our rubbish bins can get transformed into a source of clean, renewable energy.
And that’s not all. This process also produces something called digestate, which can be spread on crops as a bio-fertiliser. These crops grow to become the food that ends up on our plates. It's a circular process which helps the farmers who produce what we eat.
The wins don’t end there. Food waste recycling also helps the environment in a big way. By recycling our food waste we reduce the amount going to landfill, where it produces harmful greenhouse gases. These escape into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change.
In fact, according to the Climate & Clean Air Coalition, around a fifth of global methane emissions come from organic material like food waste in landfill sites. Each time we recycle our food waste, we help to tackle this problem.
Feed the caddy, fuel the magic
All of this good stuff is possible with the help of a kitchen caddy. It’s a nifty little bin for organic kitchen waste only. From coffee grounds to banana peel and expired meats, it can all go in the caddy as long as the packaging is removed. This is then collected by your local authority, alongside your usual waste collections.
Best kept near where you prepare food, caddies are easy to use, lock in any odours and are mess-free.
The humble kitchen caddy is small but mighty.
According to WRAP, a global environmental action NGO, a single caddy full of food waste can generate enough electricity to power an LED light bulb for more than 24 hours, boil your kettle three times, or fully charge a tablet device up to five times!
How to get involved
From April 2026, local authorities in England will be required to collect food waste, as part of new changes to recycling services. This means you can recycle the same things wherever you live.
Check your local authority website to find out when you can start recycling food waste and arrange to receive a kitchen caddy. Currently only some areas have food waste collections in place.
You can also use this simple Recycling Locator Tool to find out more about what you can recycle in your area, and where to take other items, from aerosol cans and batteries to garden waste.
Love food, hate waste
The kitchen caddy can help work wonders with the scraps of food you can’t eat, but the best place for the ingredients you buy is your plate.
UK households throw away enough edible food to fill nearly 4,000 Olympic pools each year. That’s around £1,000 per family of four that could be saved.
Getting creative with leftovers is a win for your wallet and for the environment.
Read tips and tricks to make your food shop go further, from WRAP’s national campaign Love Food Hate Waste.
Leave a comment