Zero Food Waste
Have you ever visited the Print Room Café to grab a sandwich? Or George Farha Café to get some coffee and hot food on your way to a lecture? It is a reasonable expectation that the cafés and shops on campus will have food available when we need it – but have you ever thought of what happens to the food we don’t buy?
On average, there are 200 unsold sandwiches, fruit pots, salads and pastries at our campus cafés every week. That sums up to around 6000 perfectly consumable items at risk of being thrown away every academic year, creating 1300 kg of CO2 emissions if sent to the landfill.
What can we do about this? As a student community dependent on the food provided by the campus cafés to sustain us through our busy schedules, don’t we have a responsibility not to let this surplus food go to waste? In that case, how can we prevent the environmental damage from discarding hundreds of consumable food items every week?
Who are we?
Zero Food Waste UCL is a student-led volunteering project trying to answer this exact question. We aim to tackle food waste on campus by redistributing unsold food from 13 different cafés on campus to local charities every week. Currently, we are partnered with St. Mungo’s Endsleigh Gardens (a homeless shelter), and Lifeafterhummus Community Benefit Society (a social supermarket and reuse centre). So rest assured that the surplus food is put to good use.
Thanks to the help of our volunteers, we achieved an average collection rate of over 77% in the 2023-24 academic year, saving over 8500 unsold food items from the landfill. Our project has received recognition from both within and outside UCL – we were the winner of 2023 UCL Sustainability Impact Award, consecutively the 2022-23 and 2023-24 Student-Led Project of the Year, and were shortlisted for 2022-23 National Society and Volunteering Community Award.
Our activities
Every Wednesday to Sunday, we collect surplus items from cafés on campus and bring them to our two partnered charities. Here are some of our collections:
Sandwiches make up the majority of our collections. Pictured above are another two crates of them, collected on separate days.
Flashback to that time we collected nearly 40 bottles of milk from a campus café. After delivering the surplus milk to Lifeafterhummus Community Benefit Society, they were redistributed to local residents and an afterschool club.
In addition to our regular volunteering, we also host a number of socials and events for our volunteers. Here is a photo from our very first Volunteer Day, in which we spent an entire day helping out at Lifeafterhummus Community Benefit Society. Take a look at what we did on this vlog – made by one of our wonderful engagement officers.
For 28 Days of Sustainability, we held an exhibit at the Student Centre to raise awareness about food waste on campus – with constructs built from sandwich boxes to visualise the amount of surplus food produced by the Bloomsbury campus every week. Our exhibit attracted a lot of attention, and many students left positive comments supporting our work!
How can you get involved?
As there is surplus food waste on campus every week, we are always looking for new volunteers. Our volunteering opportunities are flexible and low-commitment – each collection shift only takes 10-60 minutes of your time, with an average of 30 minutes.
If you want to get involved, why not express your interest now? After registering your interest on the SU website, we will be able to email you instructions on how to help us deliver surplus food from UCL cafés to our partnered charities. With your help, we aim to achieve total surplus food recovery!
