Britons bin £400 of food each a year

Britain is a nation of wasters who throw out hundreds of pounds of food each year, a new study has revealed.

Despite a tightening of purse strings, the average person still bins £400 worth a perishables from one year to the next.

And where previous generations would have saved every last morsel, more than half of those polled (56 per cent) admitted discarding bread every week.

Meanwhile, more than a third said they threw out bananas on a regular basis or disposed of bagged salads which go uneaten.

However, the study of more than 3,000 adults identified something of a gender divide – only one per cent of women said they binned chocolate compared with three per cent of men.

Despite a wasteful mentality, the study found most people (73 per cent) felt guilty for allowing food to go off.

And some 60 per cent said they would pack up their leftovers for lunch, while 92 per cent said they reused shopping bags.

On a regional level, those who claim to be the least wasteful were found to live in Essex where only two per cent of people admitted throwing out items every day.

The worst offenders for this were in Brighton where 16 per cent of people put their hands up to binning uneaten food while this figure was slightly lower in London, at 13 per cent.

The items most frequently binned each week are:

• Bread
• Bananas
• Bagged salads
• Lettuce
• Cold Meats
• Apples
• Milk
• Yoghurt
• Cucumber
• Potatoes.