
Retailers at Elephant Park tackling food waste together with customers
Elephant Park is fighting food waste by joining Too Good to Go, a mobile app that connects customers to food retailers that have unsold, surplus food.
- 3 Mar 2021
- by
- Lendlease Author Better Places
A number of retailers at Elephant Park, Lendlease’s £2.5bn regeneration project in Zone 1 London, have signed up to fight food waste together with customers via Too Good To Go. This is a mobile app that gives businesses the means to connect with people who can benefit from perfectly good food that would otherwise go to waste.
Currently two retailers have signed up to the app, joining over 9,000 UK businesses tackle food waste using Too Good to Go. As a result, Caribbean inspired food retailer, Tasty Jerk and Roastery and Coffee House, HEJ, are able to save delicious surplus food from the bin by selling it at a discounted price to customers via the app.
Every day, fresh food goes to waste from cafes, restaurants, hotels, and shops. Instead of throwing any surplus away, Too Good to Go provides a platform for eateries to package up and sell food into a surprise ‘Magic Bag’ (the contents of which can vary daily, based on how sales go), for it to be purchased and collected at an allotted time.
During the first four months using the app, Tasty Jerk and HEJ prevented a combined 378 meals from going to waste. This is the equivalent of saving an estimated 945kg CO2e1. That’s the same as driving approximately 2,345 miles in an average passenger vehicle.
Food waste has a large impact on the environment. It is a worldwide problem that is responsible for 8% of all greenhouse gas emissions – meaning if food waste were a country, it would be the third highest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China2.
By tackling food waste one meal at a time, retailers and consumers are helping to tackle climate change. The success of Too Good to Go at Elephant Park so far shows how retailers are supporting the development’s wider sustainability ambition to be one of the world’s most sustainable inner-city projects. It also supports Lendlease’s company-wide priority to tackle climate change by achieving Net Zero Carbon by 2025 (scope 1 & 2 emissions) and Absolute Zero by 2040. Read more about the company’s carbon target and how its Europe business aims to achieve it here.
1 Too Good to Go’s CO2 calculation is informed by research from the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. It estimates that a ‘Magic Bag’ weighs on average 1kg which is the equivalent of 2.5kg of CO2e. For more information, visit https://toogoodtogo.org/en/movement/knowledge/the-carbon-footprint
2 Oakes, K. 2020. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200224-how-cutting-your-food-waste-can-help-the-climate
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