This week’s simple swap can save up to £491 on your household food bill annually and drastically reduce your carbon footprint.

Households alone throw away £13.8 billion worth of edible food and if you split that between all of the UK’s 28.1 million households, each home would save £491 per year stated The Eco Experts.

This poses an enormous threat to our environment, as all the resources that goes into making that food is wasted and if the wasted food ends up in a landfill, then it is unable to decompose properly as there is little oxygen and sunlight, so it then in turn causes the food to release methane, which is a potent gas that has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere, and this is a huge contributor to climate change.

As stated before, it has been estimated that if food waste was a country, it would be the third highest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. So it is worth discussing this further.

There are solutions, for example apps like NoWaste, a food inventory app that helps you manage and reduce your waste. It helps you keeps track of your purchases, expiry dates and fridge contents, allowing you to see what needs to be eaten first and to reduce unnecessary purchases. 

Moreover, it is easy to use as all you have to do is hold up the barcode of a food to the barcode scanner and you can then log your weekly shop and this enables automatic reminders for when your food will expire.

Another way to reduce food waste is to find creative ways to use rather than toss food that is no longer fresh but that is still perfectly edible. For example, vegetable scraps and peels can be made into soup stock. Apples or blueberries that have gone soft, go perfectly well when cooked in oatmeal. Slightly wilted vegetables can be turned into a soups or stir-fries. There are hundreds of recipes that aim to help reduce food waste and turn them into feasts.

In Europe alone, around 30% of all fruit and vegetables are discarded each year just because of their appearance. Oddbox is striving to change this by offering food which looks: ‘too big’, ‘too oddly’ shaped or ‘too oddly’ sized” and that would otherwise have been thrown away and instead they deliver this fresh fruit or veg to your doorstep on a weekly basis.

Each week Oddbox can email you a list of the contents of the box, so that you can choose to leave some items out and to request for something else to be put in instead.

Your saving summary; by reducing your food waste by keeping track of your food and doing some ‘scrappy cooking’, you could save you up to £491 a year per household and reduce your carbon footprint significantly. Save money, save the planet.