Late Friday evening and four GoodGymers joined the fabulous team at South Liverpool Zero Waste Community's Elm Hall venue to help save food from going to landfill and redistribute it to 60 families!

Heetu arrived first and was instantly put to work by a busy team laying out chairs. Ema managed to get the wrong door and almost joined a belly dancing class by mistake but was relieved to be escorted around to the right place! With Eimear and John joining we were briefed by the fabulous Norma who leads the SLZWC team on a Friday evening, introduced to everyone and set our tasks for the evening.

SLZWC have a least two sessions a day, seven days a week, in venues across South Liverpool and manage to save an unthinkable about of food from going to landfill. As well as the huge amount of volunteers they have for each session in the different venues, they also have a fleet of people picking up all the food from supermarkets, bakeries and sandwich shops, and local shops, swiftly delivering it to the right venue ready to be sorted (by food type, and either best before dates which can be eaten at the receivers discretion, or use by dates which by law can only be used by midnight that evening!)

It's a system planned with huge attention to detail, with food safety and covid safety forefront.

We carried crates and bags, shifted tables and chairs, fetched boxes up and down stairs and helped out wherever we could, including Heetu and Eimear bagging items of food, John taking charge of the clip board and Ema giving out chocolates to the long queue of people waiting patiently in line ready to pick up their allocated bag of food.

It was an impressive sight that must take a huge amount of organising each week!

We will be back once a month to give the Friday night team a hand. You can sign up for the next session here