Foodbank Western Australia
The Environment
Imagine this:
- The best-selling muesli missing the hazelnuts & raisins ?
- The canned tomato soup labelled as corn kernels ?
- The 4 pallets of tea bags which ran out of date last week ?
- Or the 2,000 bottles of soft drink with last summer’s holiday competition labels ?
What do you do ?
Cost the value of the produce plus shipping to the landfill site, (truck, fuel, tipping fees of $70 a tonne). Deduct that from your income tax, lecture the person responsible, and dump the lot into the ground.
Every year in WA, a quarter of a million tonnes of wasted food is estimated to go straight to tips. Every tonne costs consumers $60.00 and generates a putrescent concoction that will make landfill-site remediation a boom industry 10 years from now !
Consider donating surplus stock for charitable use, even if this may involve some extra work and incur some extra cost.
We need to create a more sustainable and healthier environment for current and future generations. If achieving this objective simultaneously reduces superfluous waste while providing nutritious meals to the needy; then it is to our universal benefit.
portions extracted from New South Wales Waste Boards (eds.). Peter Schneider. "Foodbanking: Potential, Feasibility and Limitations". NSW. 1999.
Since opening Foodbank WA has re distributed over 17 million kilos of edible food to the people of Western Australia. Without Foodbank this food would have gone into landfill, thus saving 170,000 cubic meters of landfill.
Over 600 charitable agencies are supplying meals and food parcels to thousands of families and individuals in desperate need throughout WA.