Resources

In November 2021, 65 stakeholders and partners from across all sectors of the UK food industry and water stewardship community made a commitment to collectively address water risk in the food and drink supply chain across the world and joined WRAP’s Water Roadmap, embarking on a collective journey to address water risk in our food & drink supply chain. 

This report tracks progress and gives an update on achievements, whilst outlining the urgent action needed to not only deliver on targets but create a sustainable supply chain and prioritise climate action.

Over the last decade, the circular economy has been a huge success story. In the UK it has grown by 20% between 2014 and 2019. 

While roughly equal numbers of jobs are held by men and women across the UK, only 25% of jobs in the circular economy are held by women. This understates and undervalues the role of women who frequently undertake unpaid activities such as volunteering within the sector.

This methodology and data information sheet is intended to be read alongside the shorter ‘Annual Survey of Redistribution Organisations in the UK – 2022 update Key Findings’ document to provide further detail as required.

Our annual UK Surplus Food Redistribution data indicates solid progress in 2022 with approximately 170,000 tonnes of surplus food being received by redistribution organisations, equating to 400 million meals with a value of more than £590 million.

This guide is a summary of the top actions from best practice guidance developed by WRAP, Defra, and the FSA for each highly wasted food category that industry can adopt to reduce household food waste.

To help reduce carbon emissions and avoid carbon leakage, greater understanding of UK product and company-level emissions is crucial. We identified a knowledge gap in how company and product reporting standards relate to each other.

Standard bread is the second most wasted food in UK households and represents 80% of all bakery waste in the UK.

Previous WRAP research has shown that 41% of edible household food waste is a result of food not being used in time. A date label was cited as the trigger for the disposal of 600,000 tonnes (16%) of edible food waste.

This updated yogurt guidance (Publication date April 2018, updated August 2023) is to help supply chain businesses identify and implement actions that encourage consumers to reduce their household food waste.

It covers advice and insights on date labelling, storage, changes to products, packaging design and retail.

This updated milk guidance (Publication date April 2018, updated August 2023) is to help supply chain businesses identify and implement actions that encourage consumers to reduce their household food waste.

It covers advice and insights on date labelling, storage, changes to products, packaging design and retail.

This updated guidance (Publication date November 2017, updated August 2023) helps retailer and supply chain businesses identify and implement actions that deliver the greatest reductions to help consumers reduce household food waste, by explaining and demonstrating which changes to fruit and vegetable products, packs, labels and the retail environment are most effective and impactful.

This guidance has been designed in collaboration with signatories of the Courtauld Commitment 2030 and members of The UK Plastics Pact to optimise savings in plastic packaging and food waste. The collaboration is also developing a Pathway to selling more uncut fresh produce loose (‘the Pathway’) to identify which fresh produce items will be sold loose and when.

Research published by WRAP in 2022 found that adopting these actions for the five items studied (apples, bananas, broccoli, cucumber and potatoes) alone could:

• Prevent 100,000 tonnes of household food waste each year.
• Amount to 10,300 tonnes of plastic packaging removed.
• This would deliver a combined emissions equivalent to 130,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

In May 2022, WRAP published a set of Scope 3 GHG Measurement & Reporting Protocols to act as sector guidance for food and drink businesses, building on the GHG Protocol and other global standards.