Great break away in Copenhagen and a chance to start investigating sustainable packaging!

• I have just come back from a little family holiday to Copenhagen to celebrate my mum's 60th! Such an amazing city- a city of cycling, water and great food!
• Being quite an 'old school' British family we were blown away by their use of design and ended up spending hours in the design museum- fascinated by new sustainable material uses... playing grounds from old trainers, fish leathers, plastics made from mushrooms, eco coffins... the list was endless!
• If anything, our trip has left me really think of my packaging and, other than the usual recycled paper for my labels,... what could I be doing to make my jar more sustainable?

We had a fun little mention in the Sunday Times this week… take a look if you missed it.

Exciting news at Rubies in the Rubble! Our planning permission has gone through for our first kitchen ever to be built on-site at New Spitalfields Market! And there is great need for it…

There has been exorbitant amounts of food at the dump site in the last week - grapes, pineapples and all these onions! Imagine all that chutney! But it is too late once it gets as far as here.

Meanwhile the food waste bill was heard in the House of Commons last Wednesday 14th March, with cross-party support to make it an obligation for retailers to re-distribute their food before it becomes waste.

Kerry McCarthy, Labour MP for Bristol East says here in The Guardian that, “Government policy focuses on enforcing the ‘waste hierarchy’ further down the pyramid, benefiting slightly environmentally better methods of disposal (such as anaerobic digestion and composting) ahead of landfill. But there is no government incentive for diverting surplus food from disposal and to those levels higher up the food waste pyramid – for human consumption, and where unfit for human consumption, livestock feed.”

Read more about the specifics of the Bill put forward here on The Rubbish Diet blog written by a Queen of the zero-waste movement Karen Cannard who was also in attendance at Parliament.

Our new promo reel is up on youtube - share as you like! A new bill to reduce food waste is being proposed in the House of Commons this week. And I visited Food from the Sky last week, a radical initiative very much after Rubies in the Rubble’s heart.

Food waste has been called “immoral” by Bristol MP Kerry McCarthy. 50% of food is wasted throughout the EU which is hard to stomach when food poverty is on the increase. The bill will place legal obligations on supermarkets and food manufacturers to re-distribute their food. Read more at the BBC here

While we make use of surplus fruit and veg, Food from the Sky make use of wasted space on the roof above the Thornton’s Budgens in Crouch End. They grow an incredible array of salad leaves from Green in Snow, which tastes like wasabi sauce, to Land Cress and a whole range of buttery, peppery Japanese leaves. These are all harvested each Friday, mixed and bagged up to be sold through the store that day. No food miles if you live around the corner, so nearly as ‘feel good’ as growing it in your back garden. And there are many more roof-tops that could be made use of, like this one!

This week: Come and sample our chutney’s or find out more about how you can be involved at the Responsible Business Fair in the Business Design Centre, Angel on Wednesday and Thursday, with ARC: Building Better Business.

This blog will weave the tale of how “Rubies in the Rubble” works hard to make sure fruit & veg doesn’t end up here….

And instead ends up here -

We want to reach out to all the other organizations, campaigns, people, businesses, bloggers, charities that are also working towards limiting the excessive amount of food wasted in the UK.

A third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally, which is about 1.3 billion tonnes/year (according to a recent study from the FAO) and in the UK we could prevent 10 million tonnes of that food and drink from being wasted (WRAP).

So we may begin small but at least its a start.. with many amazing organizations and people we hope to join forces with along the way!