UK supermarkets and businesses throw out over 7 million tonnes of food annually, before it gets to your shopping basket. That’s enough to lift all the hungry people in the UK out of food poverty.
Globally, if food waste was a country, it would be the third top carbon emitter after USA and China.
I've started this petition as part of Stop the Rot campaign because I want to see an end to this stark injustice.
Consumers are currently asked to do the lion's share of tackling food waste, but many businesses waste more in a day than a consumer does in a year.
Someone pays for these mountains of wasted food – be it you, victims of climate change, the person who can’t afford to eat, or the supermarket’s suppliers.
Food is mainly wasted on farms and in factories, but hugely affected by retailer policy. Imagine spending all year growing potatoes, just to have them rejected for being the wrong shape or size. Or toiling to overproduce cauliflowers for fear of ever missing an order. One farmer had to plough 300,000 perfectly edible cabbages back into the field. These unjust practices need to be stopped. Hidden from view, the waste piles up and suppliers suffer in silence.
It’s time to call on UK supermarkets to tackle the food waste their policies cause in their supply chains.
Three quarters of the UK’s food is sold through Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys and Morrisons. With a strong movement pressuring them, we can make them act!
Join Stop the Rot's call for the major supermarkets to:
- regularly publish their in-store and supply chain's food waste data, including collaborating to measure food waste on farms by 2018 to enable targeted reduction.
- commit to ambitious targets to reduce their own stores' and their manufacturing suppliers’ food waste by 30% by 2025
Please sign and share this petition! Together, we can stop the rot!
