Food waste

Food waste

Newcastle City Council does not currently collect food waste as a separate collection.

What should I do with my food waste?

Food waste should be wrapped securely and placed inside your green household wheelie bin.

What happens to food waste in Newcastle?

Food waste is collected as part of our general rubbish collections and taken to the Byker Resource Recovery Centre.

Opened in 2006 this Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT) facility processes the waste and captures the organic and food content, which is then sent to an In-Vessel Composting (IVC) site at Ellington in Northumberland

How can I reduce my food waste?

Make more of the food you have

The average person in Newcastle could save up to £200 a year simply by not throwing away good food and drink in the first place.

Love Food Hate Waste: Find out here how you can reduce food waste and save money.

For recipes and suggestions for how to make the most of the food you have search social media channels for the #FlungTogetherFood hashtag.

Trick or Eat

For spooktacular ideas for what to do with leftover pumpkin this Halloween - including how to make Thai pumpkin curry, family friendly pumpkin passata pasta, pumpkin and black bean quesadillas, and peanut butter and pumpkin biscuits - check out the Hubbub Foundation's website here.

Donate to a food bank

If you have unwanted tins, cans, bottles, cartons and jars of non perishable food why not donate them to a food bank, so that they can be made available to families in need?

Compost

If you do throw away food – and around 20% of the contents of an average household wheelie bin is made up of unavoidable food waste such as peelings or the inedible parts of fruit and vegetables – then consider if you have the outside space to compost it instead.

We have partnered with the Get Composting website to offer specially discounted compost bins and wormeries. Find out more on our Home Composting page.

What is the council doing to reduce food waste?

Too much food is wasted, and we must all work together to do something about that.

As a council we have supported a wide range of partners and community groups, including Healthworks, to encouraging healthy eating and a reduction in food waste

In 2017 our independent Waste Commission recommended that we set an ambitious target to become a zero food waste city.

Our aim – A zero food waste city

In our Waste Strategy (2019) we set out a number of ambitions and actions to transform the way we think about waste.

This included that, “through the Resource Newcastle Partnership, we will work with the Newcastle Food Network and WRAP so that households, schools and businesses waste less food and save money, resulting in a zero food waste city.”

How will we achieve that?

As part of our Waste Commission consultation people were asked how likely they or other people in their households would be use a separate food waste collection service.

Seventy-three per cent of people who responded said they would be likely or very likely to use such a service if one existed.

Our Waste Strategy suggested future changes and improvements to our collection systems could potentially – where practical - include food waste.

It also stated an aim to ensure that future waste contracts, from 2025, support the separate treatment of food waste.

We also know that encouraging more people in our most disadvantaged communities to reduce, reuse and recycle more could have practical benefits; for example, helping to reduce pressure on family budgets and improving public health.

As part of ongoing work, with partners, we will use education in an effort to change behaviour, reduce over consumption and reduce food waste, which will also reduce food poverty.

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