Composting Christmas food waste

Christmas is a festival which results in vast quantities of food waste. During the Christmas season we, in the UK, eat much more than we need and 80 per cent more than during the rest of the year. Not only are we eating more we are wasting more binning approximately 230,000 tonnes of food waste during the Christmas period with 53 per cent of people confessing  that they throw away more food at Christmas and about a third of families admit to wasting some of their Christmas dinner. In fact, it is estimated that nearly 10 per cent of every festive meal is wasted. This is valued at about £64 million.  Of all the festive food turkey causes the most problems with one in 10 families having binned an entire bird as the result of a cooking mishap.

The best way to reduce Christmas food waste is by buying only what is needed and cooking and eating any leftovers. As always, the key message is Reduce, Reuse and Recycle but as a composting website our message is to home compost your waste where possible. This covers all “unavoidable” food waste including cooked food.  Uncooked fruit and vegetable wastes e.g.  peelings from Christmas vegetables and satsuma peel, can all be composted in the normal cold compost bin. Cooked foods can only be composted in a hot composting system, a food waste digester, bokashi bin or wormery. In a revised page on Christmas Food Waste on www.carryoncomposting we look at bins suitable for dealing with cooked food waste such as the Hotbin, Green Johanna, Jorra, Green Cone and Bokashi bins. The is still time to order a suitable bin for delivery for Christmas.

Non-food waste will be covered in a future post