Leftover tinned food at the end of a student term or a fridge full of fresh food before a holiday can easily go left uneaten and unused, destined for one place: the bin.

It is a throwaway culture Saasha Celestial-One had never experienced, with her food-waste conscious parents placing a high value on sharing food from a young age.

After meeting friend and co-owner of OLIO, Tessa Cook, at university, the pair mused over how to change this environmentally unfriendly trend.

They have now come up with a plan by creating OLIO, a free app that aims to connect neighbours with each other and local shops so that extra food can be shared rather than thrown away.

It could be food nearing its use-by date from shops, spare vegetables from a community allotment, cakes from an amateur baker or food people are unable to use when going on holiday or moving home.

"I have always been passionate about waste in general," Saasha says.

"My parents were hippies and they weren't very well off so food was a scarce and precious. It became engrained in me to not waste food.

"If I see a pair of jeans on the street, I will pick them up, wash them and put them in my husband's drawer and see if he notices. So I am a bit of a rescuer.

"The idea with OLIO is that anyone who has food they are not going to eat or sell for whatever reason - they just take a picture and add it to the app.

"Then people who are nearby receive a notification to let them know something new is available and, if it is something they want, they just send a message and arrange to pick it up.

"They can either pick it up directly from their neighbour or we also have drop boxes at participating businesses."

According to Love Food Hate Waste, Scotland throws away 600,000 tonnes of food and drink from the home every year, a cost which they say totals £1bn a year, or £460 for the average household.

Since launching in London last year and rolling out to other cities across England where it has been used 150,000 times, the app was officially launched in Edinburgh on Saturday with 75 people joining at a community pot luck party, each bringing along a dish to enjoy together.

This community-sharing is a strand to OLIO which Saasha says naturally follows on from a collective goal to reduce food waste.

"The desire to give something when you receive something is quite hard wired in humans and I would say one in ten times, if someone comes and collects something from me, they bring me something in return," she says.

"I got a lot of bread from a bakery a couple of weeks ago after they had a cancelled order - they had 74 extra large loaves of sour dough bread. I put it on the app and over 50 people came within 24 hours to take the bread.

"Most people took it for themselves, some took one for them and one for a neighbour and a couple came and took half a dozen loaves to take to centres for people who are vulnerable and hungry. That kind of informal giving is happening all the time.

"Pot luck parties are really about reinforcing the value of sharing food. And then hopefully people have a great time and feel inspired to prevent good food going to waste by sharing it more and more."

More than 600 people have downloaded the app in Edinburgh to date, with OLIO recruiting a team of volunteers around Scotland to help expand the idea across the country.

Postgraduate student Fran Vaughan started using the app about two months ago after spotting it on Facebook.

"As a student, I have always been quite money conscious when it comes to buying food so the idea of being able to reduce waste while getting free food was really appealing," she says.

"Students do regularly move out of their homes at the end of term and end up with a lot of food from the cupboard that gets wasted.

"When I moved into a flat, there were three of us and often you could lose track of who bought what so when it came to Christmas or summer holidays, you would realise there was stuff at the back of the fridge or cupboard.

"It was always really frustrating to think that the only option was to throw it away."

"If everyone can get 5%, or in my dream world, 10% of their food from someone when it would have otherwise gone to waste then collectively, as a society, our demand for food shrinks," Saasha adds.

"When our demand for food shrinks then our environmental impact shrinks and all of the resources that went into that food are freed to be redirected to something that is more productive.

"That is the grand vision for me of how it all ties together and how we can create a more sustainable food future one rescued cupcake at a time."