New additions to Courtauld Commitment mean 95 per cent of food retail market now signed up to voluntary waste reduction initiative
A flurry of new businesses, including high profile firms such as Boots and Nando's, have signed up to the voluntary Courtauld Commitment 2025 since its launch in March, waste advisory body WRAP confirmed this week.
The 30 new additions to the agreement, which also include Subway and Iceland, bring the total number of signatories to around 130 and mean the initiative now covers 95 per cent of the food retail market.
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A number of local authorities including City of Cardiff Council and Hampshire County Council have also signed up to the agreement in recent months, as well as manufacturers such as Quorn and Penguin and trade organisations including the British Institute for Facilities Management (BIFM) and the Soil Association.
The revamped agreement was brokered by WRAP with the aim to cut the resources needed to provide food and drink by a fifth between 2015 and 2025. The initiative also includes specific targets to cut the emissions intensity and waste of food and drink consumed in the UK by 20 per cent, and achieve a reduction in the impact of water use across the sector's supply chain.
The scheme is based on the previous Courtauld Commitment, which has been credited with cutting packaging waste and carbon emissions across the supermarket sector through the adoption of industry targets and shared best practices.
"Building connections right across the supply chain makes Courtauld 2025 a powerful voluntary agreement and we are delighted with the desire for action shown from such a range of signatories," said David Moon, head of sustainable food at WRAP.
"Already we've set up a number of industry-led working groups that are meeting to address important issues. These range from water and waste to sustainable design and buying; to areas as diverse as fresh produce, meat protein, dairy, redistribution and hospitality and food service."
Moon added that WRAP now plans launch a "reinvigorated" version of its Love Food Hate Waste campaign to reduce household food waste later this year.
The news comes as London-based newspaper the Evening Standard announced the launch on Monday of a new campaign to tackle food waste and food poverty.
The new Food for London campaign plans to help "transform an environmental problem into a social solution" by redistributing surplus fresh food from food producers to people in need.
The campaign follows the newspaper's investigations into food waste from UK supermarkets, which found 97 per cent of the surplus food which is perfectly healthy for human consumption is currently being sent for animal feed or to anaerobic digestion.
The campaign starts out with £100,000 of funding and is now fundraising with donations of up to £750,000 to be matched by The Felix Byam Shaw Foundation. The funds will go to the paper's flagship charity, The Felix Project, and will be used to expand its fleet of vans used to transport food to charities as well as recruit more employees for the charity.
"It's an incredibly ambitious and exciting challenge in the tradition of this paper's pioneering campaigning journalism for social change," said Sarah Sands, editor of the Evening Standard, in a statement. "The attitude of some top supermarkets has hugely improved over the past 18 months, but there is still a long way to go. This campaign will help recruit more suppliers to redistribute food to yet more charities, making a huge difference to hungry Londoners."
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