Wolves Waste Not is our innitiative to tackle the huge amount of waste created in today’s society and the problems that come with it – from environmental damage to financial strain. Our aim is to shift how our community thinks about waste and make practices like recycling, swapping, sharing and a circular economy a normal part of everyday life.
Wolves Waste Not
FOOD
At the heart of Wolves Waste Not is our Surplus Food Market. It grew out of The Real Junk Food Project Wolverhampton, which began 10 years ago with pop-up cafés and markets that utilised and distributed surplus food.
In the UK 4.6 million tonnes of edible food goes to waste every year. This is mostly due to over-production, over ordering, labelling errors, spurious best-before dates and short shelf-life. This equates to an estimated 10 billion meals, meanwhile an estimated 11 million people struggle with food poverty.
When food gets wasted it isn’t just the enviromental impact of it going into landfill or an incinerator, all of the resources taken to grow, produce, package and transport the produce are also wasted. Taking this into account, 4.6m tonnes of food waste creates around 18 million tonnes of CO2 emmissions. That’s considerably higher than the entire UK aviation industry!
We currently hold two weekly Surplus Food Markets at Gatis Community Space and another weekly market at our sister project at St. Chads & St. Marks Church in Graiseley. We are out most nights collecting surplus food from local supermarkets. Alongside working with Fareshare we saved over 19 tonnes of food going into landfill during 2025.
FEEDING BELLIES NOT BINS!