It’s #WorldEnvironmentDay! Every year since 1974, the UN has run this awesome initiative for the world to reflect on the importance of protecting our natural environment. This is one of the most important years to date, as we’ve entered a critical decade to avert the irreversible damage on the environment, which the UN has called ‘The Decade of Action’. We all need to do our bit to make sure the planet stays fit for supporting life. Businesses need to make the right choices towards treading lightly with their carbon footprint. The truth is that it’s just plain bad customer service for companies to be contributing to a world where their customers face drought, famine, extreme weather patterns and rising sea levels. As said by Paul Poleman, CEO of Unilever, “When the climate hurts, people and businesses also feel the pain”.
COVID-19 has been a truly devastating pandemic. We’ve done our best to support our local community during these difficult times by providing over 17,765 meals to vulnerable and isolated people (at the time of writing). It’s been truly inspirational to see how the charity sector, the business community, public services and the members of the public have come together during this crisis to support our emergency response. This has got us thinking: we’ve achieved so much to help people during the pandemic, so why don’t we also work together more on rebuilding a truly green economy once lockdown has ended?We need to #buildbackbetter when we start to rebuild when the pandemic subsides. A lot of us have had a hard run during the pandemic, and it’s shown us how vulnerable we all are to sudden catastrophe. What’s needed is a new shockproof economy that puts people first, whilst being capable of tackling the climate crisis.
Here’s what we’re doing at Fooditude to take action against climate change:
We run a business model that aims to operate with minimum impact on the environment.To make sure we achieve what we set out to do, the sustainability accreditors at The Planet Mark keep tabs on our progress. This year our top priority is to cut down on food waste and our electricity consumption.
We work with FareShare to obtain top-notch surplus food that would have gone to waste to make meals for our Covid-19 Community Response Kitchen. So far we’ve used roughly 4 tonnes of ingredients that would have been wasted.
We make sure to cut down on food miles as much as possible, by using local suppliers for our seasonal ingredients. We also do our best to source ingredients that are not industrially farmed and have been grown with minimal environmental impact. To help us achieve responsible sourcing, we have 3 stars with The Sustainable Restaurant Association and we’ve joined the SALSA approval scheme to keep us on track.
We’ve invested in two Orca food waste units that break down our food waste with microorganisms until it can be flushed away down the drain. This means we’ve been able to make serious cuts to the amount of polluting refuse collection journeys to the tip.
Any ideas on how we could reduce our carbon footprint even more? We’d love to hear it! Send an email to jricketts@fooditude.co.uk.