Feed bellies, not bins | Our zero waste lunch

I reckon if you’ve been paying even the slightest bit of attention around Brighton (our fabulous home town), you’ll have noticed the massive push recently towards cutting back on waste and forging a greener, more sustainable future. A few weeks ago it was Brighton fashion week making waves with the ‘tonne of clothing’ event highlighting the issues around clothing waste, and just last week, we were ducking out of the office in groups so we didn’t miss the brilliant ‘Feed the 5000’ event down at The Level; an initiative set up to provide zero waste lunches to the masses.

We are certainly no strangers to the world of waste conscientiousness ourselves; it’s been a big part of our objective since we started, to work towards being the sort of company that can be proud of its impact. We often benefit from talks on the subject and are committed to educating ourselves. Why just last June, we celebrated our ‘sustainable travel’ accreditation, at Brighton’s first locally sourced, zero waste restaurant Silo!

And now, being the enthusiastic, spirited bunch of go getters that we are, we’ve decided to join in the fun! We cancelled our lunch order for the day, and, armed with anything we found laying about our kitchens, and a healthy dose of optimism, we managed to cobble together QUITE the delicious spread…

From spicy roasted carrots and cauliflower cheese to jacket spuds and crispy bruscetta, today we made sure that nothing in our cupboards went to waste (and we might even have a few budding Jamie Olivers in our midst).

What we’ve seen first-hand is how easy it can be to reduce our waste with just a little thought. We are lucky enough to have our food recycling as well as our normal recycling looked after by Paper Round, a local total waste management service who share our vision for closing the sustainable loop as it were. Having all of our food waste in one container really helps us keep track of our impact, but we’re keen to reduce our impact at home as well. Ideally we’d love to solve all of the world’s problems with picnics, but just in case we need a few fail safe alternative plans…

Here are a few things we’ve learned that you can try for yourself…

• Try to plan out your meals as much as possible, to save you from buying things that will go off before you need them.
• Organise your fridge effectively to help keep your food fresh for longer.
• Use resealable packaging wherever possible.
• Get to know the differences between the ‘best before’ ‘use by’ and ‘sell by’ labelling system.
• Supermarkets will pass the buck of surplus food to us with tempting ‘buy one get one free’ offers, or with deals on bigger packages. This is particularly problematic with food that will go out of date soon. Be strong! Be aware!
• Keep an eye on those bananas! Perishable products such as fruit and veg and baked goods are the biggest culprits, often ending up in the bin.

Food for thought…

Last week, we learned a pretty startling fact from our local waste management company, Paper Round;

“If we all stop wasting food that could have been eaten, the benefit to the planet would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 5 cars off the road.”

Now that’s food for thought.