Unilever is launching a consumer challenge to UK families to help them tackle food waste
Dubbed 'The Sustain Ability Challenge', the six-month "live social experiment" will feature 12 families reducing their monthly food bills by 15% and their household rubbish by 25%.
Unilever is launching the initiative with consultancy firm The Futures Company.
The families will test practical ways to adapt their daily routines in order to reduce their impact on the environment and cut their household bills.
With 62% of adults saying a lack of knowledge about what they can do to live more sustainably prevents them from living a more environmentally-conscious lifestyle, Unilever will provide a series of tools, advice and inspiration to help the families achieve this goal. Their progress will be independently measured by The Futures Company and published in 2013. The report will then be shared with the Government, retailers and the relevant organisations in order to share its learnings.
The challenge will address the top three barriers to reducing food waste – food going off quickly, throwing away leftovers, and preparing too much food.
Research from the Fabian Society shows that more than 60% of adults in the UK recognise that food wastage is a problem that needs to be solved, while 53% said they would waste less food if its could save them money, and 28% would change their habits if they found it easier to do.
The initiative is the latest piece of activity in Unilever's Sustainable Living Plan, which aims to halve the company's environmental footprint.
'Sustainable choices'
Amanda Sourry, chairman, Unilever UK & Ireland said: "We know that nearly 70% of our environmental impact occurs when consumers use our products at home so changing consumer behaviour is one of the biggest challenges we face in achieving our Sustainable Living Plan goals.
"We are committed to making sustainable living commonplace and in order to help our consumers live more sustainably and help their household budgets go further, we need to understand the triggers, barriers and motivators to inspire people to adopt new behaviours.
"We are excited to be working with families on this new challenge and gain insight that we can feed back into the business, so we can provide practical ways for consumers to make sustainable choices easy, rewarding and habitual."
Emma Marsh, head of Love Food Hate Waste at Wrap, said: "Food waste is a major issue for the UK – we throw away 7.2 million tonnes of food and drink from our homes every year; most of this could have been eaten, costing us £12 billion."
