Instead of throwing away edible and nutrient-rich peel of bananas, oranges and other fruits and veg, here are five ways to make the most of them.

It would be strange to needlessly throw away one third of the edible part of a banana every time you have one. But that's exactly what most of us do when we discard the peel, which makes up around one third of the average weight of the total fruit.

The peel of the banana, like many fruits and vegetables, is not only edible but contains useful nutrients. For an orange, around 20% of the fruit is peel – in 2018, around 15.1 million tonnes of orange peel was generated, according to one study (that's nearly 80,000 blue whales or 2,500 giant redwoods). For a kiwi, between 9-13% of the fruit is peel. For a pomegranate, there's almost as much peel as there are seeds.

Globally, about one third of food is lost or wasted, amounting to 1.3 billion tonnes per year. Food loss and waste accounts for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions (more than triple aviation's contribution). Organic matter rotting in landfill sites also releases large amounts of methane, a potent gas 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 20-year time span. Composting food waste instead of sending it to landfill can help reduce the amount of methane released into the atmosphere. But much of what we think of as waste is in fact perfectly edible.

Within the food industry, there's growing interest in making better use of both the nutrients and the energy in the peel that typically gets thrown away. But there are ways to do this at home too.

Perhaps one of the easiest ways to use up peel are recipes that call for all parts of the fruit, not just the flesh – such as a banana and peel breakfast loaf. Here are five more options for cooking with leftover scraps which are too often thrown away.

After the Christmas holiday, I had a huge bowl of oranges left over, so I thought would try making marmalade for the first time. Marmalade is a breakfast staple in my house – I always start my day with a strong English breakfast tea and a slice of toast slathered in butter and the orange preserve. I found a recipe on BBC Good Food for the "English classic as made famous by Paddington Bear" which sounded nice and simple. There were just three ingredients: Seville oranges (1.3kg/2.9lb), the juice of two lemons and a frankly shocking amount of granulated sugar (2.3kg/5.1lb).

I quickly realised that making marmalade is not particularly fast or simple. It took me almost three hours to make two jars and involved quite a few steps, including two hours of simmering the oranges, straining the pulp through a sieve into the juice so that it releases pectin (a naturally occurring starch which helps the marmalade set). I then added in the sugar and the sliced peel and boiled the orange concoction for 20 minutes.

This clearly wasn't long enough, as while my marmalade looked and tasted great (neither too sweet nor too bitter), it remained very runny – not ideal for spreading on my toast. But I've discovered a lovely new breakfast option: marmalade with Greek yoghurt.

I had a couple of oranges left so I also decided to make candied orange peel, by chopping up peel and simmering it in boiling water for 10 minutes. You have to repeat this process three times and rinse the peels with cold water each time to remove the bitter flavour, before you mix in the sugar and water. The candied orange peel was delicious – the perfect sweet snack. I was also left with a tasty orange syrup which I've been using as a cordial in drinks.

I'm pleased that........

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