Mike Hedges welcomes Plans to halve Wales’ food waste announced by Lesley Griffiths

Mike Hedges welcomes  Plans to halve Wales’ food waste announced by Lesley Griffiths

The Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs, Lesley Griffiths has announced ambitious plans to halve food waste in Wales by 2025.

Wednesday 16 August 2017

Mike Hedges AM, Chair of the Environment and Rural Affairs Committee said… I welcome the news that the Government are going to consult on further non statutory targets. Wales has established a reputation around the world for recycling and any new targets will help develop that reputation. I urge all people in Swansea to do all of their can to help reduce food waste and recycle what they can.

Wales has made significant progress in recent years in reducing the amount of food we unnecessarily throw away.  Recent figures, published by WRAP, show a reduction of household food waste in Wales of 12% between 2009 and 2015. Wales’ household waste is now lower than the rest of the UK by around 9%. 

The Cabinet Secretary today confirmed in order to build on this progress, she intends to launch a consultation on a non-statutory target for Wales to halve food waste by 2025, against a 2006-07 baseline.

Lesley Griffiths made the announcement as she welcomed the Scottish Government’s Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform, Roseanna Cunningham, to Wales. Scotland was the first country in the UK to set a food waste reduction target.

Both Cabinet Secretaries will share views and information around  waste and resource management. Lesley Griffiths is keen to hear the Scottish Government’s experience of setting a food waste target and will discuss with Roseanna Cunningham how Wales has achieved its success in municipal waste recycling. The visit comes a week before the release of provisional annual waste statistics for 2016/17, where Wales expects to improve on last year’s rate of 60% - the third highest in the world. 

The Cabinet Secretaries will also discuss their commitment to developing a more circular economy, an approach where high-quality materials derived from waste products can be supplied back to manufacturers and productively used again and again.

Lesley Griffiths and Roseanna Cunningham will visit Newport WasteSavers, a social enterprise that promotes the importance of reuse and recycling, and Public Health Wales’ new office in Cardiff, which has been refurbished with the use of repaired and recycling furniture and tiles, an excellent example of the circular economy in action. PHW’s refit recently won the organisation an international award for Environmental Best Practice.