Budget: Reduction of Waste

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 28th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

These are great and innovative ideas and things that ought to be looked at. We have some very strict targets for increasing the recycling of paper products and we are on our way to meeting them by 2020. It means that everyone has to play their part, including the House magazine.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, has the Minister had a chance to study reports from the Institute of Engineering and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine which state that between 6% and 10% of greenhouse gases are produced by food waste, that around 100 million tonnes of food was dumped in Europe in the course of the last year alone and that, worldwide, if the food that is being wasted were available to eat, it would feed 1 billion people who are estimated to be without food or hungry today?

[Lord Bates]

The noble Lord is absolutely right. Of course, as part of our clean growth strategy, we have an ambition to reduce the level of food waste by half by 2030. The Courtauld initiative is also aiming to reduce food waste between 2015 and 2025. It is also part of the ambition of sustainable development goal 12. So all the strategy, all the rules and all the ambition are there—we just need to see the action.