Kent Food Waste Recycling campaign

Feed your Foodie is a campaign to encourage people to recycle more food waste over Christmas.

There are 3 key messages to tackle common barriers and encourage even more people to use the service:

• food waste is collected weekly

• recycling food waste helps you keep your rubbish bins fresh

• more people across Kent are recycling food waste

Food waste is the biggest component of the rubbish collected from households in Kent. It makes up 28% of what is thrown away!

Kent County Council are responsible for managing waste collected from homes as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible and with the least environmental impact. There is no better way to manage food waste than recycling it; it is converted into a renewable energy source (biogas) and fertiliser for farms. In addition to the environmental benefits, recycling is considerably cheaper than sending food waste to an Energy from Waste facility -around 1/5th of the cost per tonne. 

However, only around 34% of households currently recycle their food waste.

Over time, recycling food waste also helps people see how much food (and money) they are wasting and so leads to people changing habits to reduce what they throw away. 

There will always be unavoidable food waste like bones, tea bags, coffee grounds, peelings/stalks so the first step is to encourage people to start recycling and diverting this from rubbish bins, with the aim of reducing the avoidable food waste into the future.