Food waste disposal from hospitals - study needs your help to cut costs and improve sustainability
Can you spare 10 minutes to complete a short survey on food waste at www.foodwastesurvey.co.uk?
WRAP (the government funded Waste & Resources Action Programme) has commissioned waste
experts Urban Mines Ltd to develop a cost benefit model which can be used by hospitals to estimate
the financial costs and benefits of a range of disposal options for their food waste, to explore
whether managing their food waste more sustainably also makes sense financially.
WRAP estimates that up to 710,000 tonnes of food waste is produced annually from hospitals in the
UK, and that most of this food waste is currently disposed of either down the drain through
macerators, or sent landfill. This is not sustainable, as it wastes what could be a valuable resource.
Food waste can be recycled and turned into something useful: either soil improver for use in farms
and gardens and/or heat and electricity to power businesses and homes, depending on the
treatment process used.
To be able to develop the cost benefit model, we need your help to find out more about how food
waste is disposed of in hospitals today, and how factors such as hospital size, location, catering
arrangements, etc. can impact on choice of disposal method. We are also interested to know more
about initiatives carried out at individual hospitals and trusts to reduce or recycle food waste and
current “best practise” in the sector.
We have therefore developed a brief survey which can be accessed at
www.foodwastesurvey.co.uk
This should take you only 10 minutes to complete and asks straight forward questions about food
waste practises in your hospital or Trust. The collected data will be kept confidential and will only be
used in aggregated form. Can we please encourage you to spare this 10 minutes so we can develop
our model, and hopefully help with your decision making in assessing alternatives to maceration in
the future.
If you have any problems or question please contact Jill Sykes at Urban Mines on 01274699400 or
email her at jill.sykes@urbanmines.org.uk
August 2012