In the UK, we waste a lot of food around Christmas time. Did you know we throw away 74 million mince pies each year? But how much does it impact the environment to make the mince pie in the first place? Do you recycle the little metal tin it comes in? Or do you have the boxed mince pies with hard-to-process plastic wrapping?
Why mince pies?
In the UK, we eat 370 million mince pies a year. They became a popular treat around the festive period thanks to a tradition from the middle ages, which saw people eat a mince pie for 12 days from Christmas day to Twelfth Night. Doing this was believed to bring you happiness for the next 12 months.
These days, fewer people bake their own, and we rely on shop-bought mince pies. That means that over the Christmas period, we waste 4,200 tonnes of aluminium foil, and 125,000 tonnes of plastic packaging. Of course, these aren’t all from our mince pies, but they certainly contribute.
The real cost of a mince pie
We watched Inside The Factory’s 2016 Christmas special and we were shocked to find out how much the ingredients travelled to make our festive favourite. We know that each brand is different, but the data around Mr Kipling’s mince pies is quite surprising.
Mr Kipling’s mince pies have 33 ingredients that travel 62,000 miles to get to the factory:
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The spices come from Asia, Africa, and Russia.
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The orange oil comes from Brazil.
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The fresh fruit comes from Italy.
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The dried fruit from America, Turkey and Greece.
Don’t worry; the flour, sugar, apple, butter, and treacle come from the UK!
What about the foil casing?
Aluminium foil is notoriously expensive and energy-intensive to produce because extracting it from its raw materials is very difficult and involves heating to high temperatures. The metal can be recycled again and again cheaply, so it’s really important not to bin any foil waste.
Over the Christmas period, the UK gets through 4,500 tons of the stuff. According to the Recycle Now campaign, recycling just six clean foil cases from mince pies will save enough energy to run a TV for 30 minutes!
Okay, I feel bad, what can I do as a consumer?
Nine out of ten councils collect the foil from mince pie cases and takeaway meal containers, as long as they’ve been washed. Some are fussy about turkey roasting trays as these tend to be covered with hard-to-shift grease and fat that can jam up recycling machines, so make sure to scrub them if you’re going to recycle them with your household recycling. Each council is different, so check whether they take foil and if not, try your local recycling schemes.
When it comes to the boxes and the plastic trays, check if they can be recycled, and make sure to wash them out. Cardboard boxes should be flattened and put out with your general paper waste. Councils usually collect only dry cardboard, so it needs to be kept out of the rain – a hard task in the UK!
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