Initiative to reroute food from landfills to charities launches in B.C.

By Martin MacMahon

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – What if we could crack down on food waste while also making sure those in need have enough to eat? A new free service has just launched in B.C. with that aim in mind.

Shops or farms with food they need to get rid of can post that it’s available on the Food Rescue website, and then schools, shelters or other charities and non-profits can do a pick up if it’s something they could use.

Lori Nikkel is the CEO of Second Harvest, the organization behind the free service.

“Any kind of group that has a non-profit or charitable designation, it’s not specific to hunger relief organizations, if you’re using food in your programming in any kind of way, grab it,” she says. “In Canada, 58 per cent of all the food we produce is lost or wasted, so we just want to make sure it never ends up in landfills.”

RELATED: Food waste in Canada is staggering. But is it our fault?

Food Rescue was launched in Ontario last year, and redistributed 12 million pounds of food. Nikkel says that’s been a huge help to the recipient organizations.

“Just ensuring that good surplus food gets to people is a really important thing for our environment, but once it gets to that mission-based organization it really supports their programming so they don’t have to spend money on food, and then they can use that funding or whatever money they may have to invest in their actual program.”

The initiative is new to B.C., but Nikkel feels it will be successful here as well.

“Every community is different so I’m sure we’re going to run into a couple of hiccups but we’ve had such an enthusiastic and overwhelming response,” she says. “People want to participate, people want to do the right thing so I’m feeling very confident and happy that this is going to work really, really well in British Columbia.”

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