Part 1: Wellingtonians throw away thousands of tonnes of food each year. So why does so much food get wasted, and what can be done about it?

17 January 2011 | Max Rashbrooke

Read Part 2 of The Waste of the Earth.

What do you feel when you throw away a bag of mouldy old mushrooms at the back of your fridge, or the takeaway sandwich you never quite finished? A pang of guilt, perhaps, a stab of frustration – but what can you do? Unless you have a garden, you can’t put it in the compost, and the council won’t pick it up. If you’re at work – at a restaurant, say, or a catering company – the story is even simpler. Leftover food is undesirable, but it can’t be left sitting around – and so out it goes. 

Businesses contribute a further, staggering amount – some 349,000 tonnes a year nationally. (Figures for Wellington are not readily available.) That food, waste experts say, should be kept well away from rubbish collections, where it adds to our existing landfill problem and, as it breaks down, turns into climate-damaging gases such as methane. Unwanted food, if still edible, should be given to those who need it; if inedible, it should be used for compost. Why, then, does so much food end up in the tip?

One woman trying to tackle the food waste scandal is Robyn Langlands, the founder of “food rescue” firm Kaibosh. A few years ago she was picking up sandwiches donated by the Wishbone chain of stores and taking them to the Wellington Women’s Refuge, where she worked. “There was too much food [from the Wishbone stores] for the refuge,” she says. “I started thinking, if Wishbone had this much surplus, what about other places?”

Many delis and supermarkets already give some of their excess food away, but Langlands realised that far more could be done. Most of the food that companies will give away after closing time is only a day before its use-by date, and thus inedible unless picked up that evening. But most charities don’t have staff who will do evening pick-ups, and can’t store food overnight, Langlands says.

After “roping in” friends to help her do pick-ups, she came up with the idea of creating a not-for-profit company that could act as a go-between with food companies and local charities. In September 2009 she got a $20,000 grant from the city council; the Ministry for Social Development has given $25,000 for operating costs, alongside other donations.

Operating out of a two-storey concrete building behind the Wesleyan church on Taranaki Street, Kaibosh now has a paid office manager and 25 volunteers. It collects food from 10 Wishbone stores and the Simply Paris bakery in Newtown, stores it in fridges overnight, and distributes it the next day to six charities: the refuge, the Wellington City Mission, the Salvation Army, the Wellington Women’s Boarding House, the Downtown Community Ministry, and the Suzanne Aubert Home of Compassion.

In just one month, November last year, the company passed on 820kg of bread, sandwiches and other food, including donations from Newtown Farmer’s Market and the City Market. “It’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Langlands says. “There’s so many more places we could get food from.” The problem, of course, is money. Kaibosh’s grants so far cover only its running costs – rent, power bills, one paid staff member – and it has no money to buy a van to do pick-ups. So while food recycling firms overseas can pay drivers, Kaibosh relies on volunteers using their cars and getting a reduced rate from courier companies.

Ultimately, says Langlands, “We need to develop a more sustainable model of funding. We need to find corporate sponsors, we need to get people donating to us. It’s very tricky relying on funding grants.”

Part of the problem is that few companies will donate food unless someone makes it easy for them. Taking the initiative is “unusual – I don’t think most companies would do that,” Langlands says. “I think a lot of companies, if … it’s easy for them, would not be opposed to it. But you have to convince them that it’s not going to be a hassle.”

That means frequent, regular pick-ups; unless a company is sure that its unwanted food will be taken away and not left to sit around and go off, it won’t co-operate. Kaibosh was collecting food from a Wellington supermarket – Langlands won’t say which one – but had to stop because the supermarket staff simply didn’t understand what her firm was trying to do and wouldn’t co-operate. Kaibosh is now back to square one as it tries to “educate” the supermarket’s staff about food recycling.

Some stores, however, are trying to cut down on food waste. Loren Parker, from the Chaffers St New World, says the supermarket has reduced its general waste from around 33 tonnes a month in 2008 to an average of 23 tonnes in the last few months. Cutting down food waste – which made up 27 percent of all waste at the last audit in July 2009 – has helped hugely, she says.

Excess canned goods, “safe” fruit and veg, and bread go to the City Mission; food scraps are picked up by pig and deer farmers; some meat fat and bones go to Bones NZ; and staff take home a lot of food that is damaged or discoloured but still edible. That accounts for 70-80 percent of the supermarket’s food waste, Parker says.

Much of the rest used to be collected under the city council’s Kai to Compost scheme, which turns commercial food waste into compost. The council charges businesses a $3 monthly fee for each 120- or 240-litre wheelie bin they use, and an additional $6 fee each time they empty a bin. Despite the cost, Parker supports the scheme and says New World would “love” the council to step it up with bigger bins.

“But they haven’t got the logistics to do that,” she says. “They have reduced the service because they aren’t coping with the volume. They have even cancelled with some of their clients because they haven’t got [the ability to collect] those volumes.”

Wellington City Council waste officers were asked to respond to these, and other, points, but had not replied at the time of writing. It remains unclear why the council is cutting back on Kai to Compost, and why it has left the task of distributing unwanted food to a not-for-profit company – especially as the council appears to be spending more overall on tackling waste. Its 2009-10 annual report shows it spent $9.4m on recycling, reducing and disposing of waste, up from $7.9m the year before.

Nor is it clear how much the supermarket industry is doing. Chaffers St New World may have started to tackle the problem – but then it is, Loren Parker claims, a “leader” in this area; other supermarkets will not have done as much. Stores in the New World and Pak n Save chains are owner-operated and their food waste policies vary accordingly. Progressive Enterprises, which runs Foodtown and Countdown stores, refused to respond to the Examiner’s questions about its food waste policies.

Read Part 2 of The Waste of the Earth.