What are community fridges?
Community fridges are sponsored fridges where anyone who is hungry can come and take food for free. Local businesses and individual people can stock it with anything edible.
How does it help food waste?
The average UK household throws away 24 perfectly good meals a month – imagine if all that food went directly to the people needing a meal in your local area. 8.4 million people in the UK in 2017 live in ‘food insecurity’ – not knowing where their next meal is coming from. Having a visible prominent fridge doesn’t just tackle food waste directly but also prompts people to think about their food habits – it’s part public art installation, part direct action, part essential local service.
Think about it, how often do you sling the bottom half of your fridge? Lack of meal planning and a disconnect from the value of food has meant we’re more likely to sling than to save and for food waste to be tackled, this needs to change.
How successful have other community fridges been?
This isn’t a new idea. Community fridges have been installed in Spain, Germany, India, Somerset and Derbyshire. One fridge in Galdakao, Spain has saved around 500 pounds of food from being wasted in just over two months. In Germany community fridges can be found through Foodsharing.de.
In the US California lecturer Ernest Bertone has been playing a hide and seek game with authorities who didn’t like him setting up a community fridge in his garden. The fridge is now moved around in his community with the details shared on a Facebook group – but it highlights how often it’s red tape holding initiatives like this back.
Who’s running the Brixton People’s Fridge?
The fridge will be managed by local volunteers and the traders in Pop Brixton. Anyone else can rock up and leave food – check the fridge for more details.
Where is the Brixton People’s Fridge?
Pop by Pop Brixton and pop some stuff in there.
