Doncaster company's bid to reduce food waste and help the homeless

The UK's leading food waste recycler, Doncaster-based ReFood, has launched its campaign for a third consecutive year, to tackle two important issues; increase in food waste and the plight of homelessness.
21 Feb 2016..... Yorkshire Vision business feature on ReFood, Doncaster. Picture Scott Merrylees21 Feb 2016..... Yorkshire Vision business feature on ReFood, Doncaster. Picture Scott Merrylees
21 Feb 2016..... Yorkshire Vision business feature on ReFood, Doncaster. Picture Scott Merrylees

These are two issues which the company say are brought into focus during the festive period.

The campaign will see the company donate money to Sheffield charity the Sunday Centre and also St George’s Crypt in Leeds, for every new customer who signs up for food waste collection until the end of January.

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In the spirit of their closed loop energy from waste process, ReFood will also be making donations towards the charities’ heating bills.

Maria L’Ala, ReFood’s Regional Manager for Yorkshire, encouraged businesses to get involved in the initiative and said that these are important issues.

“This is a cause that we’re passionate about, and everyone in the business is able to come together and get behind.

“It’s a great opportunity for us to help those in need whilst helping businesses to dispose of their food waste in a more environmentally friendly way.”

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“We’ve received great feedback from this project in previous years, so we wanted to do something bigger and better this time around.

“As part of previous campaigns, we’ve diverted significant amounts of food waste away from landfill, and most importantly, we’ve been able to help some brilliant causes.”

ReFood operates a network of state-of- the-art Anaerobic Digestion (AD) processing plants across the UK, turning unavoidable food waste into renewable energy and bio-fertiliser, and has its headquarters on Ings Road, Bentley.

The initiative has become an annual event for ReFood, and to date has raised thousands of pounds for charity,

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This year’s campaign will see donations made to one of five homeless charities for every new bin collection signed up during November, December and January, to aid their efforts in helping provide food, drink, advice and accommodation to the homeless.

Last year, The Food Standard Agency and supermarket Iceland conducted research and revealed that, in the UK we throw away 34,000 tonnes of food waste on Christmas day alone, including five million litres of gravy. At the same time, official Government figures show that there were 4,134 homeless people in the UK, a figure which was 16 per cent higher than in 2015.