Marina Herrera is struggling to pack more food into her already overflowing carrier trolley and shopping bags.
In the morning shopping rush at Tesco on Dublin’s Parnell Street, she looks like any other shopper, stocking up for the week ahead.
But Marina is getting all this lovely fresh produce for free, and when she gets home, she will give it all away. If she doesn’t it will end up as part of Dublin and Ireland’s million tonne a-year food waste mountain.
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“All this would be going straight in the bin. It is perfect food, I hate to see any of it wasted,” she says.
Her efforts have earned her the rank of ‘hero’ in the global food waste war. An astonishing one third of all food grown in the world is thrown out, contributing four times more carbon emissions each year than the aviation industry.
Cutting that has been described by hundreds of world scientists in Project Drawdown as the single most effective action people can take to tackle climate change.
“I wouldn’t call myself a hero,” Marina laughs. “I was just trying to attract more people to it, get more people on board.”
That’s why she was one of the first volunteers in the ‘Food Waste Heroes’ programme launched late last year in Dublin and other Irish cities by supermarket chain Tesco and food sharing app Olio.
‘Heroes’ in the fight for the planet is exactly how Olio founder Tessa Clarke views the 250 Irish volunteers who have signed on to prevent perfectly edible food being dumped by supermarkets and redistributing it for free in their communities instead.
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“I do see them as heroes,” she says. “It was billions of small actions that got us into the climate crisis, so surely billions of small actions can help get us out of it.
“The food waste heroes are particularly powerful because they really are pioneering and leading and inspiring so many other people.
“A lot of people don’t understand just how devastating food waste is to the environment because very intuitively they think food is organic and natural so how can that be bad for the environment?”
She explains how.
Food waste:
- Contributes 10 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions
- Weigh a billion tonnes a year and costs $1 trillion
- A land mass larger than China and a quarter of humanity’s fresh water supply is dedicated to growing food that is never eaten
- That’s land that has been deforested, soil that has been degraded, species that have been driven to extinction and indigenous populations displaced
- A third of all the world’s food is thrown uneaten into landfill where it emits methane, a gas 25 times more deadly than CO2
Olio also encourages its users to post their own unwanted food and other household items for redistribution in their communities.
Globally its users have shared 35 million portions of food, the equivalent of saving 101 million car miles and 5.1 billion litres of water. Since its recent Irish launch, it already has 40,000 users who have shared and saved 12,400 food portions from being dumped.
“In Ireland a quarter of all food waste take place in the home,” Tessa says.
“Having too much food isn’t a problem. The problem is when too much food becomes waste"
Olio trains its food waste heroes on safe collection, storage and distribution of food. Nine Tesco stores in Dublin are involved in the pilot but anyone can also sign up to be a user of the app and begin sharing their own surplus food.
“Sadly, there is multipliers of more food waste than there are hungry people who can eat it,” says Tessa Clarke. “We do have people who are having a tough time who can use the app, but what they love most about it is there is no stigma associated with it. They love that it is community not charity.”
Tesco sees the programme as helping it to reach its target of zero food waste. Launching it last month, Communications Director, Rosemary Garth said: “We want to make sure that all surplus food is being managed, that it shouldn’t go to waste and where people who need it have access to it.”
It’s not the only supermarket chain in Dublin involved in the battle to reduce Ireland’s food waste mountain which the Environmental Protection Agency estimates at more than one million tonnes a year, the equivalent of 3.6 million tonnes of CO 2 – or around 5 percent of Ireland’s total emissions in 2018.
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The biggest offender is the family home which throws away €700 to €1,000 of edible food every year. That’s 150 kg per house or 250,000 tonnes.
Like many other issues, the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the problem. A survey by supermarket chain Aldi found Irish shoppers dumped €365 worth of food each after panic buying in lockdowns with one in three admitting they bought and dumped more food during the pandemic.
Meanwhile as the waste mountain was growing, so was food poverty. Aldi Group buying director John Curtin said the chain - which has donated 2.3 million meals and diverted 3.2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent from landfill – also began donating non-surplus stock through Irish food sharing company FoodCloud to meet demand from charities.
FoodCloud was founded in 2013 by Aoibheann O’Brien and Iseult Ward to connect retailers with local charities to donate food on a daily basis. To date, it has redistributed 67,000 tonnes, the equivalent of 160 million meals and avoided 214,000 tonnes of Co2 equivalent.
During the pandemic it reported a doubling of demand. Between March 2020 and August 2021, charities sought 53% more food donations compared to the previous 18 months, with 4,822 tonnes of food, equating to 11.5 million meals, distributed through FoodCloud hubs and supermarket partners like Tesco, Aldi and Lidl.
On one busy Monday morning in Lidl’s store on Cork Street in Dublin, some of that surplus is sitting on a pallet waiting to be distributed by manager Andrius Zajenkauskas. Boxes of cereal, dried goods and soft drinks make up this morning’s donation which Lidl’s Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, Owen Keogh hopes will be welcomed by the outlet’s two local partner charities, the Donore Community Drug and Alcohol team and the Clay Youth Project.
“Every store has an app and is linked up to a local charity,” he explains. “It means the food doesn’t have to travel to a hub to make its way back down here to someone who needs it around the corner. So far, we’ve donated 3 million meals. A lot of food would have gone to waste before that.”
When the donation leaves Lidl on Cork Street it will travel just a few hundred metres to the Donore Community Drug and Alcohol Team (DCDAT).
Aldi’s survey that revealed shocking levels of food waste in the pandemic, also found three out of 10 adults reported knowing someone who struggled to buy food.
Some would have ended up at the doors of the DCDAT where on this morning Thomas Connolly is welcoming callers when we visit.
He is helping pack one of sixty, €30 food hampers the team distributes weekly, containing items like tea, sugar, beans, peas, cereals and porridge. Housed in the grounds of the local St Theresa’s church, its backroom and fridge are packed with FoodCloud donations.
“We deal with addicts, homeless people, people with mental health issues, those affected by addiction and anybody looking for food or a bit of a dig out,” Thomas explains.
“Because we are in a socially deprived area people are finding it hard to make ends meet.
“Demand has increased. Because of the pandemic we decided to start doing twice-weekly, takeaway meals at the door, and the demand for that was huge. We were having to do 40 meals at a time because people weren’t working, they wanted to feed their kids.”
Thomas says since the last recession the area has been decimated of its social support network of charities and community groups.
“There were breakfast clubs, after-school clubs, community development projects, different elderly groups - they’re all gone. We are literally last man standing,” he says.
“The families that relied on that are turning to us now. Food will go to waste if the supermarkets have to put it in the bin. Here none of it goes to waste, someone always need it.”
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