'Food waste could help our farmers'

A Labour MP has said a new weekly food waste recycling service could help farmers, by turning food waste into fertiliser.

Mary Creagh, MP for Coventry East, said taking food waste out of black bins and putting it "into anaerobic digestion to create digestate fertiliser" will help farmers due to fertiliser prices soaring because of "conditions in the Middle East".

Coventry City Council will introduce a new weekly food waste recycling service for households in September - five months after the government's deadline.

Twenty-three litre food caddies will be distributed to residents and will be collected five days a week, leaving other bins to be collected on different days of the week.

The Simpler Recycling legislation was introduced to make recycling simpler, and to avoid people needing what it called an "excessive number of bins."

Creagh said: "At the moment there is a bit of a postcode lottery across the country, so we are bringing in simpler recycling so you'll get the same bin collected wherever you are.

"With our food waste, it is really important that we take that out of the black bin because at the moment that is going to landfill and it's rotting and it is causing odours".

Creagh added that food waste could also be turned into "green gas to heat homes, electricity to heat homes, bringing our bills down".

The ongoing war in the Middle East has seen fuel and fertiliser prices rise.

Iran's continued blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has led to higher costs for fuel and fertiliser, both crucial elements of food production.

The National Farmers' Union president Tom Bradshaw said the pressures "span the whole food supply chain" and could cause food prices to rise.

While Creagh suggests the new scheme will save food waste from being sent to landfill, other councillors in Coventry are worried that thousands of plastic caddies could end up there instead.

The council has ordered 141,000 food waste caddies with 23 litre capacity, using £1.8m of capital funding received in April 2024 for the service.

"Personally, I would have liked to have seen it being a choice for the customer as to whether they opted in, because I suspect that 300,000 of these [caddies] will end up in landfill," Councillor Ed Ruane said.

Follow BBC Coventry & Warwickshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.