Recent figures published by the Government funded WRAP (www.wrap.org.uk), showed that a jaw-dropping £8 billion worth of food is thrown away in Britain every single year. That is just over 6.7 million tons of food and is just about enough waste to fill Wembley Stadium eight times.

Another way to look at it is that for every three shopping bags of food we buy, we will not eat the products contained in one of them. We waste a third of the food products that we buy and for a family of four that is the equivalent of throwing away over £600 per year!

A simple solution is to get yourself organised, make a weekly meal plan, stick to it and only buy the food that you need. Not only will this save you money it will also put a stop to you having to remove the squashed, mouldy hairy vegetables that embed themselves into the bottom of your fridge. This will only take fifteen minutes a week to prepare and if it can save you £600 per year it is a very well spent fifteen minutes.

Another great tip is to bulk buy in order to reduce the actual packaging required for the products that you do purchase. It will reduce your costs and the amount of packaging that heads towards landfill sites.

Get rid of the Plastic…

The trouble with plastic bags is that they take hundreds of years to ‘break down’ (or decompose) and as a result they are an ecological disaster that are already causing damage to wildlife and filling up landfill sites across the UK. Worldwide some 500 billion plastic bags are used per year and because each bag is made of oil the plastic bag does create an extremely large carbon footprint too.

In Britain it is estimated that each person uses 134 plastic bags each year and fortunately, many supermarkets are now realising the problems associated with this and are trying to discourage people to use them, this is often in the form of providing their own recycling bag schemes or selling their own ‘bags for life’ with the aim to gradually replace and phase out the plastic bag altogether.

It is now best practice for the environment to take your own ‘bag for life’ to the supermarket, or reuse plastic bags that you have picked up on other occasions. Many recycling services now allow for used plastic bags to be picked up and then recycled – there really is no excuse anymore and if enough people act then the plastic bag could be a thing of the past.

Buy Organic

Organic farming does not use chemical fertilisers or pesticides, an action that benefits the soil, prevents pollution to nearby water sources and generally is good for the environment. It may cost a little bit more, but surely at least your food has not been sprayed with a cocktail of chemicals.

Organic or free range meat and fish are reared under normal conditions and therefore have less artificial hormones or pesticides and are better for you, the environment and also the animal’s welfare whilst it was alive.

Although not technically organic, when next buying coffee, tea, nuts or dried fruit from imported countries keep an eye out for the Fairtrade logo. Fairtrade ensures that small farmers in developing countries receive a fair amount of money for their product.

The Plastic Bottle Mountain

Bottled water has become a multi-billion pound industry with more than 150 billion litres of bottled water being sold worldwide each and every year. More and more people are drinking bottled water and although it is great for your health it leaves a really big carbon footprint and it could lead to the same environmental problems that plastic shopping bags pose.

The problems are that (i) the bottles are made from petroleum; (ii) there are greenhouse gas emissions involved in shipping or transporting the water long distances and transporting the bottles to recycling of landfill sites; and (iii) there are emissions associated with keeping the water refrigerated.

Many people believe that bottled water is healthier or a safer option than drinking tap water, but not many realise that there are actually more stringent and tighter controls on tap water than its bottled counterpart. It is also worth considering that bottled water can also cost up to 1,000 times as much as tap water. So is it really worth paying all that extra money when you can get exactly the same from your tap?

Check the Energy Efficiency Ratings

Look out for the energy efficiency rating (which is compulsory) of any fridges, freezers, washing machines and other white goods you buy. They are rated from A as best down to G. The less energy that is used means the product will be cheaper to run. Check out www.energy-efficient.co.uk for a quick guide to these ratings and what they mean.

Something Different…

If you want to go that one step further and really cut back on your carbon footprint then the quickest way to do so would be to become a vegetarian and cut back on diary. Cattle belch and excrete a substantial fraction of the world’s methane emissions – up to 20 per cent. When you consider that much of the planet’s rainforest is destroyed in order to clear land for livestock or growing their feed, you suddenly realise that becoming a vegetarian or cutting back on your meat intake could really benefit the environment.