Credit: GUEST
Reporter
The Glasgow University Environmental Sustainability Team (GUEST) are currently having a trial run of a new communal fridge in the University library. The fridge contains food that has been donated from local businesses that would otherwise go to waste despite still being edible. The fridge is free for everybody to help themselves and it is located on level three of the library next to the vending machines.
The fridge is currently in a stage of a soft launch, where GUEST is collecting food from local businesses several times a week. The society hopes to fully launch the fridge towards the end of January and early February, once they have gathered volunteers to pick up the food and have gotten used to the collection. Rhona Fecke, the GUEST sustainable food promoter states on the Facebook Group of the project:
“The Fridge was set up as a way to do something about the huge amount of food that gets thrown away every day while still being perfectly edible. The UK wastes around 10 million tonnes of food each year, but 60% of this could be avoided.“
As for now, the fridge is being filled with products from Tesco’s and on a white label states the pick-up date of the food. After the trial period and finding out how often the fridge has to be refilled, there could be other businesses joining in with the donations as well.
The idea of the community fridge was inspired by other such movements, as for example the Strathclyde University Community Fridge. The project goes along several other major projects GUEST runs to improve sustainability on campus, such as green laboratories, outreach opportunities, improvement of biodiversity on campus, targeting waste throughout the university and others.
Katie Homyer, GUEST coordinator says: “Our team are working incredibly hard on these projects and are seeing real change occurring at the University of Glasgow.“
