FOOD4THOUGHT: Preventing food waste

Luke McFarlane speaks to Curtis and Elaina, two students from City of Glasgow College, about innovative ideas for the climate crisis for the ‘100 Voices: Home and Away’ project.

Elaina presenting the FOOD4THOUGHT presentation. Photo courtesy of Elaina and Curtis.

Marketing students at Glasgow City College were asked to come up with innovative ideas to help fight issues relating to climate change. Curtis and Elaina came up with the idea, “FOOD4THOUGHT”.

Curtis

“What we aim to do is prevent food waste in Scotland. We looked at the statistics and we seen that a lot of people were wasting lots of food each year and it was amounting to tonnes and tonnes of CO2 emissions and methane, which we are trying to combat with this campaign.

“So, we thought, and the idea was to create a food bin that would record your waste and tell you how much food you’re saving and how much of the climate you’re helping. So, the bin would connect to an app and tell you how much waste you are putting in the bin.

“We created a series of posters that would go on Instagram and each of these would tell you a different fact about climate change and how much we waste per year. It would tell you that CO2 does the greatest damage and is heating the earth every year, with the tagline “FOOD4THOUGHT”.

Elaina

“We wanted to focus our objective on food waste and how that impacts the environment.

“Our idea to tackle food waste in Scotland was to create a campaign to show visually how much we waste and how we can show the world how much of a problem that is.

“We came up with the idea for a food bin, it’s called ‘Earthy’ and it’s (the idea) that when you get rid of the food waste it weighs the amount that you’re getting rid of.