We love Too Good To Waste

We caught celebrity chef Thomasina Miers on BBC 1 Breakfast TV yesterday. She's owner of the Wahaca Mexican restaurants in London and has thrown her stylish eateries behind the Too Good To Waste campaign.

The campaign was launched by the Sustainable Restaurant Association towards the end of last year and is designed to make diners feel more comfortable about asking for doggy bags or boxes and encourage an increasing number of restaurants to offer them. Celebrity backers of the idea include Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Giles Coren the restaurant critic for The Times, and food writer and broadcaster Matthew Fort.

The doggy bag concept comes from the United States and most of us probably associate it with huge American portions that are just too much to eat in one sitting. But the fact is that for every meal eaten in a UK restaurant, nearly half a kilo of food is wasted – through preparation, spoilage and what’s left behind on the plate. We’re throwing out 600,000 tonnes of food waste from restaurants every year.

Here at Make it and Mend it we launched our Thinking Outside the Bin campaign last week. It's all about the joys of upcycling things that would otherwise end up in the waste bin. You can find out more about our campaign here.

We're all for reducing the amount of waste that finds its way into restaurant bins. How many time have you left part of a delicious meal on a restaurant plate and then suffered an attack of the munchies later? Today's doggy bag is tonight's snack or tomorrow's packed lunch.

BBC presenters this morning were a bit concerned about re-heating things, but as all Make it and Menders know, you just need to follow some common sense rules when making tasty food from leftovers

But perhaps we could come up with a better term than doggy bag or box? What do you think?

You can find out more about the scheme at Too Good to Waste. Sadly their interactive Where to dine map only covers London.

Anne Caborn

Waste Not Want Not

Did you know that according to Waste Watch, the volume of waste we produce in the UK in one day is enough to fill Trafalgar Square up to the top of Nelson's Column? When averaged out over a year this equates to 300 million square metres of land, that's the same as covering the pitch at Manchester United Football Club's ground, 28,450 times .

Or that the UK uses over six billion glass bottles and jars each year? It would take you over three and a half thousand years to sing "Six Billion Green Bottles Hanging on the Wall"! We produce and use 20 times more plastic today than we did in the 1950's! An average person throws away 74kg of organic waste each year, which is the same as 1077 banana skins and 900 million items of clothing are sent to landfill each year.

This is pretty shocking stuff and when you realise that on average, each person in the UK throws away seven times their body weight in rubbish every year. It is quite humbling that we are so wasteful, but what shocks me more is not just the amount we throw away, but the quality of what we throw away. Ok, we have schemes for recycling, but that is about plastics, papers and tins etc. If you want to get rid of larger items, what happens to them? Yes there are schemes out there that will relieve you of your items, but this sort of recycling is centred on somebody else doing the work. If you want something recycled you have to give it to somebody else to take away and deal with. More importantly it seems that a lot of people can’t even be bothered to pick up the phone and organise it, a huge amount of perfectly serviceable items are taken to local rubbish tips every day and dumped.

Just think of all that wasted potential sitting on a tip, waiting to simply rot away. So many of these items are perfectly useable, just a little worn and faded or surplus to requirements. This throw away society that we live in means that we think it is acceptable to just dump things that we no longer want and buy something new. And yet all some of these items need is a lick of paint and a little TLC and they could have years of service left in them.

Your local tip is a great place to go bag a bargain. Take a trip and see what you can find. One note of caution though is that some local authorities will allow you to go and buy things from a specially designated site, but others refuse outright on the basis of health and safety, so do double check before you go.