The question of waste
The focusing question for a consideration of waste was, What is the real impact of different approaches to processing and waste and how does this put consumption into
context? Initially, this can be viewed from four perspectives. First, in effect, waste is the
disposal of something that has/had value. After all it was purchased. Disposal often has a cost, in that you may have to pay to have it removed and then pay tax on top of that. In the UK, the Landfill Tax for Active (that is not inert) waste is £48/tonne (Green Wise,
2010). Such a cost would apply to waste food, for example, and there is also an
opportunity cost in that the caterer has paid for a product that they are now going to pay to dispose of and that money could have been used elsewhere. Thus, waste food from preparation and from the leftover food on the plate is wasted money and an additional
cost. Specific information on the levels of waste from the catering industry is difficult to
come by, however, more generic figures indicate that in the UK we waste £10 billion worth of food every year. On a domestic level, 8.3 billion tonnes of food waste is sent to landfill, costing the average UK family with children £690 per year and
producing as much carbon dioxide as 25 percent of the UK’s cars (WRAP, 2010).
Second, waste can also be considered to be using more of something than is necessary. The catering industry consumes large amounts of water and energy. It wastes some of this by consuming more than it needs to, it then may have to pay to
dispose of the wastewater, for example, in terms of sewerage costs, something that in
the UK is based on water consumption. Various authors have looked at reducing water consumption in a commercial context (Seneviratne, 2007) and for a more general text
see Webster (1999). Waste energy is lost to the atmosphere, at some point it will have
produced carbon dioxide and contributed to global warming, unless it has been produced from a carbon neutral source