Sustainability Action Plan

about this principle

Food accounts for around 28% of our eco-footprint but it's easy to reduce this impact and be healthier too. The ecological footprint is so high because we waste around a third of the food we buy, because most people in the UK have a high meat and dairy diet, because of transportation (food miles) and because of energy intensive agriculture.

Aim

Supporting local shops, and buying local, seasonal and organic produce, with reduced amount of packaging, eating less meat and dairy; the aim is to help minimise food-related carbon dioxide emissions and make us healthier too.

By 2020, a significant proportion of food should be locally sourced from low environmental impact farming with reduced packaging from a radius of 50 to 100 km from the centre of Sutton. Given the importance of food to eco-footprints, we suggest that between 25% and 50% of food by weight should be local and low impact. But how can we measure this? It is up to people what they eat and we certainly can't police what goes into shopping baskets. What we do need to do is make sure that people in Sutton have easy access to local and sustainable food. So to start off with we need to map out where the local food supplies are located, and then start contacting shop keepers and markets where there are gaps, so that we can persuade them to stock healthy and sustainable food.