Even the staunchest supporter of the packaging industry has concerns about the amount of packaging a trip to the supermarket can produce, but the amount of food wasted by households in the UK is even greater.

The Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) estimates that we throw away a third of all the food we buy, and to prevent waste on such a costly scale, to the environment and to consumers’ pockets, it has committed to working with retailers, consumers, local authorities and community groups to reduce consumer food waste by 100,000 tonnes by March 2008.

A campaign to make the public aware of the scale of the food waste problem will kick into action this September. It will need to render some unbelievable facts believable to inspire action (see below: Food waste facts).

One of the reasons we waste so much food is simple: we buy more than we need and often throw away food that is still perfectly edible. With ‘buy one get one free’ offers always seemingly on the increase, Britain is becoming even more of a throwaway society.

According to Wrap’s recent Understanding Food Waste research, consumers do not appear to have made the connection between the food we waste and the environment. “Consumers simply do not recognise that greenhouse gas emissions are generated from the cultivating, transporting, processing and storing of food before purchase and that, if food is thrown away, all this effort and environmental impact goes to waste too,” says Mark Barthel, Wrap’s special adviser. “We are much more sensitive to packaging waste than food waste with almost three-quarters of us agreeing that ‘discarded food packaging is a greater environmental issue than food thrown away.’”

A decade of food deflation means the economic motivation to be careful with food has been eroded. Dick Searle, Packaging Federation chief executive, believes use-by dates may also need to be addressed as modern refrigeration and packaging techniques extend product shelf life longer than consumers are used to.

Packaging consultant Terry Robins agrees: “Sell-by dates, too, are one of the biggest causes of food waste, because they are really only an indicator of when something is ‘past its best’, but people often take it to mean when something should be thrown away. So anything that can help use-by dates to be more accurate would be helpful.”

The environmental impact of food waste is one that Searle thinks packaging producers can help reduce, but that the impetus will have to come from the retailers “because we [the packaging industry] do what we’re told. It’s not for us to specify.”

The industry is already producing packs and technologies that could contribute to ensuring less food is wasted.

These include time-temperature indicators, reclosable pouch and bag formats, oxygen scavenging materials, improvements in modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) and better seal integrity; in essence, any technology that can make partially consumed food remain palatable and therefore more likely to be consumed rather than wasted.

A pertinent example of how just a little bit of packaging can make all the difference to reducing food waste is the simple cucumber.

Following a comment about the need to reduce packaging waste, a supplier to a major retailer asked if the Cucumber Growers’ Association could justify the use of shrinkwrap on cucumbers. An in-depth investigation revealed that a film wrap can extend the life of the fruit to 10 days, compared to the three days it would take to shrivel and bend if it was unwrapped.

Barthel says that retailers and brand owners need to be a lot more intelligent on the portioning of their food products. “They need to think more about how consumers end up using their products rather than just concentrating on how to deliver it to them in the store,” he says. “Using two 250g twin packs instead of one 500g pack could help reduce food waste.”