sustainable development
Taking “zero waste” to heart A variety of cutting-edge citizen initiatives have made this country a trailblazer in reducing food waste. By Guillaume Jan Photos Frédéric Stucin
“
O
ur store carries a bit of everything. Olive oil, chocolate, beer, vegetables, fruit. Over here are some strawberries we recovered yesterday. Since some of the containers are damaged, the supermarket that was selling them chose to get rid of the entire batch and sell different produce that was better-looking. And instead of throwing the strawberries away, he called us and we loaded them into our van.” Jan-Martin Mikkelsen is the manager at one of Copenhagen’s two Wefood outlets. These general (and generous) stores only sell food that was going
to be thrown away – because of poor packaging, an expired sell-by date, or because it doesn’t meet the usual standards. Wefood recovers the products, repackages them if necessary, and sells them at anywhere between 30% and 50% below the original price. “In fact,” Jan-Martin continues, “every item we sell has a story.” Everything is of course still perfectly edible. In the early days, consumers were hesitant, unconvinced that the articles had been rejected simply because of missing labels, or because the bottles were dirty. These charitable supermarkets, created in 2016 by the Christian humanitarian
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organisation DanChurchAid, serve a dual purpose: to sell products at lower prices and, most importantly, to combat food waste. “A third of the world’s food goes to waste,” says Birgitte Qvist-Sorensen, the charity’s General Secretary, in their premises opposite the central train station near the Tivoli gardens. “And yet, at the same time, 800 million people around the world are going hungry.” This staggering reality is what spurred Qvist-Sorensen to open these stores that are simultaneously economical, ecological and social enterprises. “DanChurchAid’s founding mission has been to help the poor and fight
