FareShare: Waste not, want not
Last year, Workspace employees decided to support the UK charity FareShare which works to tackle food waste and food poverty at the same time.
Think about these frightening facts:
5.8 million people in the UK live in ‘deep poverty’, making it hard for them to afford every day essentials, including food.
At the same time, 3.9 million tonnes of food is wasted every year by the food and drink industry.
FareShare is a brilliant charity which takes good food that would otherwise be thrown away and redistributes it to those who are the most in need. In fact, if just 1% of food that was fit-for-purpose was redistributed, FareShare would be able to provide food for 70 million meals. Supermarkets and food manufacturers deliver the food they aren't selling (before the use-by-date) to a warehouse in south London. This over supply could be due inaccurate forecasting of demand or to problems with packaging for misprints. Normally this food would be thrown away but Fareshare stores whatever comes its way, whether it's caviar, broccoli or cans and cans of spaghetti hoops.
Workspace Group Ltd donated £4,900 to support FareShare’s work in London.
During the month of March, this enabled FareShare to redistribute enough food for 143,000 meals.
The impact of this achievement was that we:
Fed 7,250 vulnerable people each day across London
Saved 52 tonnes of food from going to waste
Prevented 26 tonnes of harmful CO2 emissions
The food was delivered to over 150 charities, including children’s breakfast clubs, hostels, day centres for the elderly, women’s refuges, after-school clubs and drug rehabilitation centres.
Twelve Workspace staff also volunteered 96 hours at the FareShare depot. They’ll be telling us over the coming weeks a bit more about FareShare and what they did during the day. Here’s a bit of the feedback so far:
“I truly enjoyed volunteering for the day in FareShare. The passion of the FareShare team is contagious. I was personally shocked to learn that so many people do not have easy access to food in the UK, a developed country. Thank you to FareShare for making people in poverty feel loved and cared for.”
Whether they’re tin factories in South London or pill factories in Bethnal Green, Workspace is known for taking old buildings and redeveloping them into new and exciting spaces. Perhaps Workspace employees chose to support Fareshare because both organisations operate on similar principles in different ways: ‘Waste not, want not.’
Find out more about FareShare.
