Seminar on food-waste management

The Cinnamon Grand held a seminar on Food-Waste Management. Organised by the hotel's Sustainability team, the seminar focused on food waste and its future consequences, if monitoring and management is not implemented.

The Assistant Director of the Central Environmental Authority, Mahesh Jaltota highlighted the importance of food-waste management and its implications, in the context of the hospitality industry.

As one of the largest and busiest hotels in Colombo, with a 1,200-strong workforce and over 12 restaurants, food-waste management is an important concept to Cinnamon Grand.

The seminar was attended by associates from all departments in the hotel.

Jaltota said that people generate artificial waste and warned of irretrievable damage in the future, if not controlled.

He elaborated on the impending crisis with regard to the emanation of carcinogenic gases and contamination of water, which not only endangers animals but also spells out a doomed future void of fresh air to breathe or clean water to drink.

In a statistical breakdown of Municipal waste in Sri Lanka, Jaltota said that a large quantity of waste consists of food. He emphasised the importance of employing the 3 R policy of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, in our day-to-day life.

He gave some tips on managing and monitoring waste, in a corporate and personal context, such as creating sanitary landfills, using compost bins and e-waste recycling and using a lunch box instead of lunch sheets and recycling your shopping bags.

Statistics from the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation show that 925 million people in the world, which amounts to 13.1 percent of the estimated world population of 6.8 billion (one in seven people) go hungry, with more than 30 percent (1-3 billion tons) of the world's food production ending up as garbage, which would otherwise be enough to feed three billion people. That over nine million people (of which five million are children) die worldwide each year, due to hunger and malnutrition.

It is also estimated that 14 percent of the world's CO2 emissions are caused by food waste alone.