Welcome to Zero Waste Week Day 1! I hope you’re as excited as I am. As you may know already, the theme for 2016 is ‘Use It Up’ with the aim being to reduce food waste.

Besides reducing our food waste this week, we’re also hoping to reduce our energy usage and enjoy more family time. Starting today on Zero Waste Week Day 1, I’ll be storing our landfill rubbish (except cat litter!) in a jar for the first time ever. I’m not even attempting to reach the dizzying heights of Lauren Singer or Bea Johnson – I’d need a very large jar to fit our annual waste in! It’s more of an exercise to see how well we can do for a whole week when we really make a big effort.

Here are a few stats on food waste, which I found on Zero Waste Week and The World Counts:

• At the time of writing, globally this year 474,225,491 tonnes of food have been wasted. You can watch this number rising here.
• The food wasted by the US and Europe alone could feed the world three times over.
• Food production uses water. In the US, food waste accounts for 25% of water use.
• One tonne of food waste prevented can save the equivalent of 4.2 tonnes of CO2.
• One third of food grown on the planet never reaches a human.
• The amount of bread we waste each day would stretch up and down Mount Snowdon 110 times.
• The average UK household wastes £60 worth of food per month and over £700 worth of food annually.

I’m hoping to blog every day, however brief the blog post is. I’ll hopefully be covering topics like reducing food waste when you have young children, how to meal plan, how to shop with willpower (here’s a clue – it’s not a person!), using up leftovers and the best way to freeze them.

For Zero Waste Week Day 1, I thought I’d share some things I’ll be doing this week to avoid wasting food:

• Planning our meals for the week around what I can buy package-free and what we have in the cupboards.
• Planning what to do with our leftovers. This could include eating them for lunch next day, incorporating them into another meal or freezing them for later.
• Keeping an eye on the contents of the fridge like a hawk to make sure we use things up before they go past the point of no return.

We’ll be involved as a family and I’ll hopefully be encouraging our children’s school to get involved too. However, it is the first week back at school, so I suspect they might be a bit busy settling down to a new term to get on board.

Do you have a plan for how you will ‘Use It Up’ in Zero Waste Week? How has your Zero Waste Week Day 1 gone?