Scots throw away £1.1 billion worth of good food every year

Olympic bronze medallist Eve Muirhead and brothers Glen and Thomas are working with Zero Waste Scotland to call on people to embrace their freezers and help cut food waste.

Scots throw away £1.1 billion worth of good food every year, despite the fact that much of this food could have been frozen and eaten at a later date.

To mark European Week for Waste Reduction 2017, Zero Waste Scotland is launching a campaign to encourage everyone to “Love their Freezers”.

Backing the campaign is the famous curling family, no strangers to freezing conditions themselves, who are currently preparing for the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea in February 2018.

With food waste a 1.35 million tonnes annual problem in Scotland, Zero Waste Scotland is encouraging people to think of their freezer before heading for the waste bin.

For example, Zero Waste Scotland recently highlighted the staggering scale of potato waste: every day in Scotland, we bin around 500,000 spuds.

Eve said: “With all three of us training so frequently there wasn’t always time to cook from fresh every day. We remember that mum or dad would often batch cook nutritious meals and then they were just ready to heat through before we rushed out the door.

“We had no idea the scale of food waste in Scotland and it will make us think twice about using our freezers more now we all live away from home.”

Iain Gulland, chief executive of Zero Waste Scotland, said: “It may be getting colder outside, but at home people could be making much better use of their freezer to get the best from their food and minimise waste.

“We know from our work in communities throughout Scotland that people are often unsure about what can and cannot be frozen. For example, people don’t always realise it’s safe to freeze almost any food before the use by date on the packaging and then defrost in the fridge. We need to dispel these myths and demonstrate to everyone that most food can be frozen.”