Host: Matt Myers
Guest: Tessa Clarke | Co-Founder & CEO | OLIO
Category: 🍏 Sustainable Food | Food Waste
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[0:43] MM: “OLIO is a free app tackling the problem of waste in the home by connecting people with their neighbors, so that surplus food and other household items be given away rather than thrown away. Launched in the UK in January 2016, OLIO now has over 4 million users who have together shared over 20 million portions of food and 3 million household items. […] OLIO has also recently launched a new section that enables neighbors to sell homemade food and handmade crafts.”
[11:19] TC: “OLIO is all about connecting people with their neighbors so that we can give away rather than throw away your spare food, initially, and now also other household items. And having spent a lot of time trying to understand why we throw away so much food, I've realized there's a ton of reasons. We over cater for parties, we go on diets, we receive unwanted gifts, we decide to have a takeout instead of cooking, et cetera. But that explains why you have too much food, it doesn't explain why that food becomes waste. And the reason why it becomes waste is because we're no longer connected to our local community. We no longer have something to give our spare food to.”
[25:46] TC: “The first [household] swap [to reduce waste] was a super simple one. And that was swapping your plastic toothbrush for a bamboo toothbrush. Every single toothbrush that has ever been made in the history of humanity still exists in a landfill somewhere. […] Another thing I'd really encourage people to do is to buy some net grocery bags and buy your fruit and veg loose and just pop them into your grocery bags. And then […] the bar soaps.”
[29:01] TC: “Globally, a third of all the food we produce each year gets thrown away, which is worth over a trillion US dollars. Alongside that we have 800 million people who go to bed hungry every single night, who can be fed on just one quarter of the food that we waste in the Western world. And that is if that weren't bad enough, the environmental impact of food waste is absolutely devastating. If it were to be a country, food waste would be the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after the USA and China. And that's because a landmass larger than China is used every single year to grow food that has never been eaten. […] The greenhouse gas emissions from one kilogram of food waste is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions from […] [25,000 plastic] bottles.”
[31:52] TC: “In a country such as the UK, half of all food waste takes place in the home. And this is really counterintuitive. Most people assume that most food waste takes place at a store level. And actually in the UK, just 2% of all food waste comes from stores. […] I believe in the United States about 40% of all food waste takes place in the home. And in the United States, a typical American family throws away about $2,000 of food that could have been eaten every single year.”
[46:44] TC: “We do have home cooked food added to the app. I would say it's less than 5% of what is shared. […] Half of all the food added to the OLIO app worldwide is requested within 21 minutes of it being added to the app. […] A third of all the food added to the app is fresh fruit and veg. And then a quarter is bakery, and cakes, and pastries and stuff like that. And then the remainder sort of fairly evenly split between cupboard items, and all sorts of other food items.”
Rating: 🍏🍏🍏
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify | Google (Original Title: "OLIO: Tessa Clarke")
🕰️ 1 hr 11 min | 🗓️ 06/28/2022
✅ Time saved: 1 hr 9 min
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