Giveaways in supermarkets that encourage customers taking more food from the store than they can eat, will soon be banned in the UK. Environmental supervisory authorities of the country became concerned about wasteful attitude to food: according to statistics, about one third of all food products is sent to a dustbin.

The report of the Ministry of Environment, Food and Agriculture of the United Kingdom, dedicated to the issue of national food security offers a scary statistic. Households throw away 4.1 million tons of food each year - one third of all food products. Such extravagance costs each family an average of about 420 pounds ($ 700) per year. Each adult brings to the trash more than 60 kg of food every year, ie more than he weighs. Typically, people who live alone throw away the biggest quantity of food (and those households represent about a third of population in Britain).

Purchased food must be placed in the refrigerator

Giveaways under the scheme of “buy one, get second for free” play not the last role here. They provoke customers taking away such volumes of food from stores, that they just cannot eat them until the expiry of their validity. As a result, food is spoiled and goes in the trash.

Department of Ecology encourages disposing products more efficiently, says Times. It developed a state program to reduce food waste and set a goal: starting next year, households have annual savings of at least 370 million pounds per year (more than $ 600 million) due to a more reasonable treatment of eating.

As part of this campaign, retailers may prohibit giveaways with perishable products, where buyers offer to buy this or that product in larger quantities and with great discounts. Therefore, managers of supermarkets in Britain, apparently, will soon have to invent new ways to quickly dispose of such products from shelves. And retailers should, albeit unwittingly, promote the new policy, but in case of “disobedience” they will face prosecute.

However, an industry group British Retail Consortium, comprising British retail chains, said it would oppose attempts to prohibit giveaways. “Retailers must have the right to solve such issues,” - said a representative of the organization. Что With regard to the surplus of food people buy because of such giveaways, “they can share them with family and friends,” he said.

Throw away less

In addition, the authorities will encourage retailers to arrange an “outreach” work with customers: to give advice on how to reduce waste volumes. For example, hang tabs with information on those products that can be stored for a long time in a frozen form, or give out recipes that can be made from overripe fruits and vegetables.

In turn, the Agency for Food Standardization is preparing new guidelines for clearer labeling of products shelf life. The study found that millions of people see no difference between the concepts of “sell-by” and “use-by” and, moreover, do not know what giveaways are fit for use after the expiration date “best-before” (”recommended to use before”).

By the order of UK  Government, this year there will be a number of products with the tab Healthier Food Mark (a kind of “healthy product” sign) - it will mark any product that meets the standards of use and can be stored for a long time. Products with this sign will be produced throughout the country since 2012, they will be necessarily bought by hospitals and prisons.

Third World countries do not care

In Third World countries, most food waste also goes to landfill from apartments, rather than from manufacturing plants and stores. However, the countries still not introduced a system of sorting garbage and food scraps are thrown together with other solid waste, then calculating the amount of damage from waste products discarded after the end of expiration date is not yet possible.

The system of food waste recycling is also developed very bad: companies on garbage recycling can receive sorted food waste only from companies and then sell them to cattle farms.