Food waste comprises roughly a third of all household waste of which almost half is avoidable.
In 2018, the average household threw away 164 kg of food per annum, of which 86 kg was avoidable. The average cost per household of discarded avoidable food is around $640 per year. On a national basis this equates to 157,398 tonnes of avoidable food disposed of to landfill, at a cost of $1.17b.
Find out more about the New Zealand Food Waste Audits October 2018 on the Love Food Hate Waste website.
Horowhenua District Council has teamed up with Love Food Hate Waste to provide a meal planner as another resource for minimising waste.
The Easy Choice Family Kai Recipe Book meal planner is the easy choice for feeding your family! The meals are affordable at around $60 a week, healthy (nutritionist-approved) and zero waste. It contains four weekly meal plans, with each week consisting of five dinner meals. Each meal will feed a family of six (two adults and four children under 10) or four adults.
Easy Choice Family Kai Recipe Book (Summer Recipes)(PDF, 5MB)
Easy Choice Family Kai Recipe Book (Spring Recipes)(PDF, 5MB)
Easy Choice Family Kai Recipe Book (Winter Recipes)(PDF, 3MB)
Easy Choice Family Kai Recipe Book (Autumn Recipes)(PDF, 5MB)
Find more recipes and information on ways to reduce your waste on the Love Food Hate Waste website.
ShareWaste have developed a website and app to allow people to share and recycle their kitchen scraps, in order to promote organic waste as a valuable resource, divert waste from landfills, make gardens greener and help your neighbors. Hosts receive organic waste from donors, to process kitchen scraps into new soil.
You can search your area to either donate your scraps or host on the ShareWaste website, or you can download the app.
The Community Fruit & Veg Stand is a wonderful initiative for the community to share produce from their garden. Levin now has a Community Fruit & Veg Stand at the RSA/Community Hub on 32 Bristol Street.
The stands are primarily for fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as eggs, but they can also take small donations of non-perishable foods, such as preserves or canned goods. Home baking is also accepted, but other cooked food is not. Help yourself to the stand and if you have anything spare from home feel free to drop it off.
Below is a map of all locations of Community Fruit & Veg Stands, created by the Community Fruit & Veg Stands Facebook Group.
It's best to keep food and garden waste out of our rubbish bins, where it will end up in landfill. Conditions in landfill aren’t right for organic waste to break down into compost; instead it rots, and produces methane (a greenhouse gas). It also contributes to making toxic leachate, which can contaminate our environment.
Our friends at Kāpiti Coast District Council have created a simple guide of household options for food waste.