Climate Action Boost

Since July 2019 Aber Food Surplus have been funded by the National Lottery Community Fund, and their recent funding enabled the project to receive a ‘Climate Action Boost’ to facilitate further community action on reducing the impact of climate change. As part of this initiative Aber Food Surplus will be able to take 3 more steps towards climate action. 1. To develop a ‘Ridan’ composting facility to work towards a more sustainable and circular food system by producing local compost for growing projects; 2. To execute our carbon accounts and take action on reducing our organisations carbon emissions; 3. Reduce our transport emissions by introducing a bike scheme that will enable more volunteers to transport food and get to gardens and kitchens by bike. 

Producing compost from food waste and increasing the use of bikes for our food redistribution operations is something the team at Aber Food Surplus have been passionate for many years. Using bikes is fun, healthy and carbon neutral, and promoting and enabling their use can increase volunteers' confidence of using bikes more broadly in their lives. As we work with food surplus there is naturally a fair amount of bad food in the bunch, and turning this into compost for growing projects could increase the resilience and sustainability of local food growing by reducing reliance on imported and heavily processed compost (for more information on compost see here). 

Analysing our organisations carbon footprint is inspired by both our organisations ambition to lead by example in a Climate Emergency, and through learning and opportunities from the Renew Wales Climate Network.

Renew Wales Network is hosted by many inspiring and active organisations working to address climate change with the community and share learning. In October Renew Wales funded Heather, an employee at Aber Food Surplus to attend the Zero Carbon Britain online course delivered by the Centre of Alternative Technologies. This course emphasised the urgency at which carbon reduction solutions are needing to be implemented and highlighted the first steps to addressing this as an organisation: to understand our carbon accounts to create a carbon reduction plan. The sessions were inspirational and relevant to taking action, and the array of speakers from different sectors showcased other exciting avenues of community action such as energy and transport schemes. 

Through the Climate Action Boost and with support from Renew Wales, David Thorpe from the One Planet Centre will mentor the team to understand the carbon accounts, and to develop a real time understanding of the impact of food redistribution and sharing. 

Since the project started in December 2020, we were quick off the mark in installing our composter, and the next blog post will share more about the story of the composting project so far!