Q&A with Zero Waste Hay
What is Zero Waste Hay? Very simply we take unsold or excess food from supermarkets, shops and producers and we give it away to the local community. It’s free for anyone who can use it. Mostly the food is just a day past it’s ‘BestBefore‘ date which means it’s still safe to eat, but can’t be sold, it can’t be given to food banks either as it’s mostly perishable produce, so would have been thrown away if we didn’t collect it.
Where and when can people find you? We set up a small stall in Hay Cheese Market every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We open at 10am and will be there till all the food has been collected. Sometimes this only takes 10 minutes as people have started arriving early and forming a queue to be ready for when we open.
What gave you the idea to start the group? A few years ago I read some shocking statistics about how much food is wasted and how the carbon footprint of this contributes to climate change. Since then I’ve been making a concerted effort to reduce food waste at home. I came across Zero Waste Stall in Ross-on-Wye, they were the inspiration for what we do in Hay, they’ve been running for a number of years and have saved thousands of tonnes of food from being sent to landfill.Then I saw the Co-op Hay were advertising for a community group to take their excess food and thought that we should set up our own Zero Waste Stall in Hay and so here we are...
Describe a typical day at Zero Waste Hay: We’re a very simple operation - first job of the day is to pick up any food Co-op have for us, add this to any other produce we’ve been given (we’re getting lots of local apples at the moment). Then we set up the stall in Hay Cheese Market, upload a quick video to Facebook showing what we have available and wait to open at 10am.
Do you have any plans to grow? Zero Waste Hay works because it’s local, so we don’t have any plans to open in other locations. We’d be really happy to share our knowledge if people inTalgarth or Brecon wanted to do something similar in their community.
However we’d really like to find a few more suppliers to work with, so we’d love to hear from any shops or producers that have excess food they’d like to share. zerowastehay@gmail.com
Do you need any help? We will definitely need volunteers in the future, but it’s still early days for Zero Waste Hay and we want to make sure we get everything running smoothly before we ask other people to come and help.
What has been the response so far? It’s been really well received by everyone so far. Co-op are pleased that good food isn’t being thrown away and the people of Hay have really got on board with the idea of making use of this free food.
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know? We’re terrified of being left with mountains of food, so please do come along and collect anything we have.