Preventing waste in the first place

Here are a few tips to reduce your waste:

• Donate surplus or unsold stock – donate surplus food to charity or have an employee fridge for products that they can eat or take home free of charge. Guidance is available on How food businesses must dispose of food and former foodstuffs;

• Use paperless marketing methods and offer paper free receipts by emailing them to customers;

• Purchase recycled, refillable or reusable products wherever possible;

• Provide water fountains for staff and customers to use and use reusable cups, crockery, and utensils;

• For take-away drinks encourage customers to bring their own reusable cup by charging for single use cups and

• Ensure that packaging on your takeaway food and drink is minimised and that what packaging is used, can be recycled or reused.

There may be some costs to making these changes for some workplaces but increasing how much you recycle could reduce your waste disposal costs in the medium to long run. As this law applies to all food and drink caterers, it will be factored into business and management models. Hospitality, food services and food and drink manufacturing sectors are some of the UK’s largest producers of waste, producing waste streams that are generally easy to recycle.