Following Julian Parfitt’s nomination for the Resource Hot 100 (vote for him here), we caught up with him to find out more about his role, and explore some of his own motivations and insights for tackling food waste. This is part 1 of the interview, carried out by our Marketing Apprentice Sophie Taylor.

How long have you worked in sustainability?

I’ve worked on sustainability issues since 1982, which was when I landed my first project trying to measure and characterize waste. I’ve been at Anthesis for nearly 3 years now, my first job in a global sustainability consultancy.

My earliest project was with the Greater London Council when it was run by Ken Livingston and at the time was spending a lot of money on environmental research – I was in charge of a survey of over 20,000 London businesses looking at their hazardous waste production – and that’s how it all started.

At the time there wasn’t much of an environmental consultancy sector in the UK, so I was working for a market research agency as their only environmental scientist. Later I worked as an academic helping the Department of the Environment to design national research programs to measure household waste composition and the quantities of packaging waste.  I also worked on a research project with a group of environmental economists looking at the ‘environmental externalities’ associated with landfilling waste. The results were used to set the initial levels of the UK landfill tax in 1996. At that time I also established the Department’s first reporting system for municipal waste statistics. This was one of my interests because the UK then lacked any proper statistics on waste or recycling and it was an opportunity for me to improve upon that situation. I developed the preliminary surveys for the Department of the Environment to create a better understanding of how much waste was being recycled relative to landfill or incineration. This grew into the established reporting system that local authorities now use across the UK, and has influenced and informed policies at both local and national levels.

I’ve only been a consultant for a decade or so, and a lot of my knowledge comes from the in-depth research that I’ve done as an academic, which is where my particular interest in food waste came from.

What changes do you think we’ll see in the future in relation to food waste, and what changes would you like to see?

Future food waste policy should have stronger links with the wider set of societal issues about how much food gets used, healthy eating and initiatives to address food poverty. This territory is a long way from ‘entry level’ food waste policy, which has focused on ensuring that food waste doesn’t end up in landfill. But the debate needs to move on with a greater sense of urgency towards waste prevention, and consideration of the moral issue of keeping ‘food as food’ wherever possible, if it’s still suitable for human consumption and, failing that, using it for animal feed if that can be done safely. The work that WRAP has done in the UK since 2007 has provided signs of hope that these issues can be effectively linked through evidence-based delivery work and partnerships across the food sector, local authorities and consumers.

We’re still a long way from prioritizing keeping ‘food as food’ and there are a number of issues internal to food businesses and retailers that will need further work, as well as keeping up the momentum on consumer food waste campaigns. Clearly these are a much more complicated set of issues than simply sending food waste to an AD facility or to a landfill site.

In addition to this, there’s still a lack of transparency on food surplus and food waste reporting and a pressing need to establish a common set of ground rules for reporting. This is important because consumers want to know about food waste and businesses need to measure it in order to understand its full cost: which is always far more than they are paying for its disposal.

What’s your most notable past achievement or project?

There’s one stand-out project:  I was seconded to work on the UK Government’s Foresight program, which commissioned a study on global food and farming futures back in 2011. The program had tremendous scope and had hundreds of scientists working on it from all over. It was looking at the increased pressures on the global food system caused by growing demand for food, energy and water and the challenges of feeding over 9 billion people by the year 2050. I was seconded to the team reviewing global food waste within this complex of issues, which I did on behalf on WRAP. As part of this work we convened the first ever international meeting on global food waste, which was funded by the Foreign Commonwealth Office. We drew up a list of people we wanted to attend, who then came to London from all parts of the world to discuss the different aspects of food waste, supply chains and the various drivers across the world, and what policies might be needed to address those drivers.

The Foresight findings were published in a series of articles that appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society including one article on quantification of global food waste, where I am the main author[1]. It talks about different patterns of food loss and waste across industrialized and developing economies, with the latter experiencing far more significant losses at the earlier stages of the supply chain in contrast to more affluent countries where post-consumer food waste accounts for the greatest share.

The study received extensive media coverage, which was beneficial in drawing attention to food waste as an issue of global significance, and I haven’t really seen it fall off the agenda since then.

Please check out part 2 of the interview here, and vote for Julian in this year’s nominations here!

Dr Julian Parfitt is Resource Policy Advisor & Practice Leader here at Anthesis Group. If you would like to know more about how Julian can help your business tackle the issue of food waste, contact him at Julian.Parfitt@anthesisgroup.com.

The Resource Hot 100 was created to celebrate achievements in the waste and resources sector.

^{[1] http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/3065}