More than throwing away food, single-use plastic is the more insidious threat

Food waste has long been reviled as an immoral, largely preventable feature of our consumer society.

An estimated 4.7 million tonnes of edible food is thrown away by households each year in the UK, according to the Waste and Resources Action Programme , an environmental charity that runs the Love Food Hate Waste campaign. This wastage seems especially wrong at a time when escalating food prices have driven many British households to become reliant on food banks .

Meanwhile, the single-use plastic packaging used to reduce food wastage poses a more insidious problem. Once discarded, the single-use plastics that cushion, seal, protect and extend the shelf life of our groceries can linger in landfills, beneath the ground, in rivers and on the seabed for centuries .

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