Zero Waste Week: eddys challenges the hospitality industry togo beyond plastic free

Zero Waste Week (7 to 11 September) is an annual awareness campaign encouraging individuals, businesses and organisations to reduce landfill waste, conserve resources and protect the environment. 

This year, the team behind eddys, the UK’s first deliciously sustainable spoon, is calling on the hospitality sector to consider its role in reducing disposable cutlery waste. 

While research into disposable waste is difficult to quantify, previous investigations indicate just how quickly single use items can accumulate, particularly across foodservice and workplace environments. The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs estimated that England used 2.7 billion items of single use cutlery in 2023. Similarly, research conducted by Restaurant Associates (November 2021) highlighted that an individual attending the office three days per week consumes more than 144 pieces of single use cutlery over three months alone. 

The solution eddys offers is simple: why waste the spoon at all?  Made from five grains and seeds (amaranth, poppy seeds, quinoa, chia seeds and flax seeds), eddys is designed to be eaten during or after use meaning it leaves no trace, and no waste. Why chuck it, when you can eat it? 

The UK has made efforts to tackle single use waste, from the introduction of the 10p carrier bag charge in 2021 to England’s ban on certain single use plastic items in 2023. More recently, the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme has placed greater responsibility on producers to reduce packaging waste. With such incentives, the market has increasingly moved away from plastic in favour of alternatives such as wood and paper pulp. 

However, the fundamental issue remains – these products are still designed to be used once and thrown away. If we have simply swapped one disposable material for another, have we really solved the waste problem – or just rebranded it? 

Edward Rowlandson, founder of eddys, said: ‘We have made progress in moving away from single use plastic, but we need to think about what comes next. We have spent years asking what we should make disposable products from, when perhaps we should be asking whether they need to be disposable at all.

‘For one business, a spoon might seem insignificant, but multiply that across thousands of hospitality businesses and millions of transactions and the scale of single use material – which requires high energy to recycle – becomes impossible to ignore. Zero Waste Week is the perfect opportunity to challenge that thinking. Why waste the spoon at all?’

eddys is not about finding a slightly better material to throw away, it avoids creating the waste all together. This thinking is already being adopted by hospitality businesses such as The After School Cookie Club where it is stocked, and discussions with several cafés and quick service restaurants across the UK are well underway. Likewise, the company is collaborating with a number of food brands including  Oat Avenue, ChicP, Onken and Renourish to help showcase the ease of eating your spoon rather than wasting it. 

For eddys, moving beyond plastic free means questioning the need for disposable products altogether. What better time to consider this than Zero Waste Week?