With Exeter City Council declaring a commitment to making the city carbon neutral by 2030, the Exeter Sustainability Awards recognise and champion individuals and organisations making strides in the field. In November of last year we decided to try for an award and were delighted to hear in February that we were finalists in the community group / charity / non-profit category.
Our category recognises projects of sustainable energy, climate resilience, environmental and social best practice, or environmental and social innovation. We thought that rescuing and delivering food weighing as much as three jumbo jets, preventing much of it going to landfill, placed us in a reasonably good position and made what we thought was a compelling case.
In the UK we produced around 10.7 million tonnes of food waste in 2021, 6.4 million tonnes of which (60%) came from households. Many of us think that scraping excess food from a pan or dish, or just disposing of that wilting cabbage we’d overlooked in the fridge into our kitchen bin, is pretty harmless. Doesn’t most food biodegrade naturally over time?
Actually no – in landfill, for example, things are a bit different. With the weight of layers of waste on top of the food the process is starved of a key component of natural decay. Anaerobic digestion is the scientific term, which in lay terms means ‘without oxygen’ and, although decay occurs, oxygen starvation changes the process into one that generates substantial amounts of methane gas as the food breaks down. A US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report suggests that methane gas is up to 28 times more harmful than carbon dioxide (CO2), trapping planet warming heat in the atmosphere. So, with a pitch that we help to reduce climate harming levels of methane in the atmosphere, while simultaneously enabling support for people experiencing food insecurity, we thought we were in with a chance.
On the 22nd of March EFA’s volunteer coordinator, Wendy Kearns, and trustee, Andy Kemp, attended the awards ceremony, hopeful of success but also conscious of the many excellent submissions that accompanied EFA’s. With bated breath they observed awards for several categories, announced by Emma Askew, an environmental researcher and founder and director of Earth Minutes, an organisation with ‘a mission to drive the future of environmental thinking and learning’. When our category’s turn came, as camera lights flashed and heart beats went into overdrive, it was announced that, of the six finalists, Exeter Food Action had come joint second, pipped to the post by an eminently deserving winner, a Royal Devon & Exeter NHS project minimising the carbon footprint of anaesthetic gases.
Receiving a ‘Highly Commended’ award was a great honour and, although there was no time for Oscar-like acceptance speeches, the award must surely be dedicated to and shared with all of our hard-working staff and dedicated volunteers, indeed everyone who has played a part in our success by supporting the work that we do, getting good quality, nutritious food on to the tables of people who need it.
But as the award acknowledged, it’s not just that. Since the industrial revolution, methane gas has been responsible for around 30% of the rise in global temperatures. Reductions in methane emissions are key to limiting near-term warming and improving air quality. We can be proud of the fact that Exeter Food Action is playing a meaningful part in that too.