IncrEdible! How to save money and reduce waste

The new academic year is a chance to get to grips with managing your student loan and kitchen cupboards. Over lockdown the UK wasted a third less food than we usually would. This is brilliant, as normally over 4.5 million tonnes of edible food is wasted from UK homes every year. For students, it’s even higher. The average cost of food waste per student per week is approximately £5.25 - that's about £273 per year! It’s not just our bank accounts that are affected by food waste – it’s our planet too.

The process of growing, making, distributing, storing and cooking our food uses masses of energy, fuel and water. It generates 30% of the world’s CO₂ greenhouse gas emissions. The same amount of CO₂ as 4.6 million return flights from London to Perth, Australia! So it makes sense to keep as much food out of the bin as possible, start wasting less and saving more.

Start the new term with some food waste busting, budget cutting, environment loving habits! Here’s five easy ways to reduce food waste from your kitchen.

Conquer the cupboard!

Before you head to the shops, check what’s in your cupboards, fridge and freezer. Make a list and stick to it! Supermarket deals are designed to get you to spend more, and often student accommodation has limited storage space.

Chill the fridge out!

Turn your fridge temperature down to between 0 and 5°C to keep food fresher for longer. Having it too cold can actually spoil some foods!

Freezy does it!

Make the most of your freezer! You can freeze more than you think. Try bulk cooking things like chilli or stews and freeze some portions for when you’re feeling lazy. Check out the Love Food Hate Waste A-Z of Food Storage to double check anything.

Defrost like a boss!

Once you know what’s in the freezer, it just takes a bit of forward planning to save money and avoid a last-minute dash to the shops or Deliveroo.

Use it or lose it!

Get creative with your meal ideas and find ingredient swaps, recipe ideas and leftover hacks on the Love Food Hate Waste website. These are sure to impress your new friends and save you money!

For more information contact sustainability-estates@bristol.ac.uk

The University of Bristol’s Sustainability Team are making a sustainable university, by managing our precious resources, maintaining our sustainable standards and minding our impact on our communities.

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This blog is written by Emma Lewins and Anya Kaufman, Sustainability Interns at the University of Bristol.

Converting probabilities between time-intervals

This is the first in an irregular sequence of snippets about some of the slightly more technical aspects of uncertainty and risk assessment. If you have a slightly more technical question, then please email me and I will try to answer it with a snippet. Suppose that an event has a probability of 0.015 (or 1.5%) of happening at least once in the next five years. Then the probability of the event happening at least once in the next year is 0.015 / 5 = 0.003 (or 0.3%), and the probability of it happening at least once in the next 20 years is 0.015 * 4 = 0.06 (or 6%). Here is the rule for scaling probabilities to different time intervals: if both probabilities (the original one and the new one) are no larger than 0.1 (or 10%), then simply multiply the original probability by the ratio of the new time-interval to the original time-interval, to find the new probability. This rule is an approximation which breaks down if either of the probabilities is greater than 0.1. For exa...

1-in-200 year events

You often read or hear references to the ‘1-in-200 year event’, or ‘200-year event’, or ‘event with a return period of 200 years’. Other popular horizons are 1-in-30 years and 1-in-10,000 years. This term applies to hazards which can occur over a range of magnitudes, like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, space weather, and various hydro-meteorological hazards like floods, storms, hot or cold spells, and droughts. ‘1-in-200 years’ refers to a particular magnitude. In floods this might be represented as a contour on a map, showing an area that is inundated. If this contour is labelled as ‘1-in-200 years’ this means that the current rate of floods at least as large as this is 1/200 /yr, or 0.005 /yr. So if your house is inside the contour, there is currently a 0.005 (0.5%) chance of being flooded in the next year, and a 0.025 (2.5%) chance of being flooded in the next five years. The general definition is this: ‘1-in-200 year magnitude is x’ = ‘the current rate for eve...

A dirty relationship

I went to see Cabot Institute Artist in Residence Neville Gabie ’s Archiving Oil installation in the Basement Stores of Geology last night (16 May 2013). It’s pretty cool to be down in the depths of the Wills Memorial Building at the University of Bristol and I can safely assure you I saw no ghosts. I started off by going into a lift and as the doors opened into the basement, there was an eerie darkness with a bright light emanating from a creepy corner. A man dressed in white was in front of me and he was pouring a sticky black substance into buckets. A distinctly thick, gloopy and dirty sound filled my ears. I promise you it wasn’t a ghost but the image in front of me was quite harrowing. We use oil in everything we do and here was oil in its bare nakedness – black, shiny, thick, dirty. I stopped and stared for a while, mesmerised by the horribleness of the clean white background being splatted with this dirty substance. ...

Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

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