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By Justin Goulet

Reducing Food Waste

New website launched by Environment Lethbridge

Sep 10, 2019 | 11:08 AM

LETHBRIDGE, AB – There’s a new website in town.

Environment Lethbridge has launched a new site to help residents reduce food waste and save money.

The website, wasteless.ca/food, has information, tips and advice on items like meal preparing, best before dates and how to store food properly.

“Food waste is sort of a hidden problem. I think that we all feel a little bit guilty when we throw away that squishy cucumber in the bottom of the fridge,” said Kathleen Sheppard, Executive Director at Environment Lethbridge.

“When you start to look at the numbers of the amount of food that gets wasted in Canada, it’s quite staggering. Estimates are that the average household probably wastes over 1700 dollars every year.”

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Sheppard said raising that awareness on how to decrease food waste was a catalyst in launching the new website.

“Lethbridge is no different from anywhere else in the country. We have some data from the City of Lethbridge where they did some waste audits and discovered that about 20 per cent of the waste stream in Lethbridge is food waste,” she told Lethbridge News Now.

“This is something that people can do something about in their own homes. It’s not something where it’s companies or governments who necessarily can take action on this, it’s everybody and it saves you money as well as helping the environment.”

She added that being organized when it comes to food can go a long way, noting that comes down to four key strategies, including:

· Planning your meals: “I think some of us, everybody’s busy and sometimes it’s easier to just go to the store and grab things, but if you take that extra 15 minutes to think about what you’re going to eat through the week, that makes a difference,” Sheppard said.

· Shopping and buying what you need.

· Cooking effectively, “so that you’re not wasting things.”

· Storing food properly, which includes understanding best before dates.

Sheppard explained that there are not only cost-saving benefits for residents but benefits from an environmental standpoint.

“Reducing food waste is really interesting because when food waste goes into the landfill, it releases methane, which is a greenhouse gas – so, this is something that people can do to directly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Even though it seems like a small thing, collectively it makes a big difference,” she said.

“It also just reduces things like taking up space in our landfill. At the end of the day, we want our landfill to be as efficient as possible and things that don’t need to be in there shouldn’t be.”

Environment Lethbridge will be at various events across the region this fall to showcase the new site.