Where does meat pollution come from?
20 November 2024
According to the FAO, in 2017, 323 million tons of meat were produced in the world. Each year, 65 billion animals are killed for human consumption (2,000 animals per second).
The last report of the IPCC stated that reducing meat consumption can contribute to the goal of limiting global warming to +1.5°C in 2100. But where does meat pollution come from?
You’ve seen it in the featured image:
- 44% comes from their digestion and their waste. Why? Because they produce methane, which has between 30 and 86 times more greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide.
- 41% from production, and transformation of food to grow cattle
- 10% from manure storage and processing.
- 5% from meat transportation. Eating local meat rather than imported meat is not efficient in reducing emissions from your diet.
This is the basic vision. If we deep dive a bit into the categories and the type of meat, we get a few more learnings. (We’ve added a few plant-based foods for comparison).
Quick definitions here:
- 🌳 Land use change: changes in biomass from deforestation, and in soil carbon
- 🚜 Farm: methane emissions from cows, emissions from fertilizers, manure, and farm machinery
- 🌾 Animal feed: On-farm emissions from crop production and its processing into feed for livestock
- 🏭 Processing: Emissions from energy use converting raw agricultural products into final food items
- 🚛 Transport: emissions from energy use in the transport of food items in-country and internationally
- 🛒 Retail: emissions in energy use in refrigeration and other retail processes
- 📦 Packaging: emissions of the production of packaging materials, material, and end-of-life disposal
26% of beef’s footprint comes from land use
We need 25 kg of food to produce 1 kg of beef (1). Producing all this food requires a large amount of land. As the production grows, the need for land grows as well. The number one reason for the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest is breeding. 91% of land available after deforestation is dedicated to breeding or cereals to feed cattle. And the destruction of the forest means less carbon dioxide absorbed and oxygen released.
Quick maths: imagine if we reallocate this 91% of land from the Amazon rainforest. Let’s say that 50% of this land is dedicated to cattle, and the other one to cereals to feed cattle. So we could produce more cereals for human consumption in the first half, and reallocate the cereals in the other one. If it takes 10 kilograms of plant protein to produce 1 kg of beef protein (this is different from kilograms of food vs kilograms of beef seen before), we could then 11x plant proteins produced from this land for human consumption by stopping meat consumption.
If we do this with other lands in the world, we could even stop the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. It means more oxygen is released and more CO2 is absorbed. It means then, less GHG and less global warming. This will be developed in a coming article.
The footprint differs from where the meat is produced
🐔 Chicken
- Canada. Between 4.7 and 5.8 kg CO2e (1) 🥇
- The United Kingdom. Between 11.6 and 14.9kg CO2e (2)
- Brazil. Between 4.0 and 20.4kg CO2e (3)
🐖 Pork
- France. Between 8.0 and 15.2kg CO2e (4) 🥇
- Brazil. Between 7.7 and 22.7kg CO2e (5)
🐂 Beef
- Indonesia. Between 225 and 365kg CO2e (6)
- France. Between 42 and 55kg CO2e (7)
- Ireland. Between 36 and 46kg CO2e (8) 🥇
🐑 Lamb & Mutton
- Australia. Between 21 and 61kg CO2e (9) 🥇
- France. Between 38 and 72kg CO2e (10)
- Ireland. Between 40 and 58kg CO2e (11)
🥜 Chickpeas
- Canada. Between 1.2 and 1.4kg CO2e (12)
- Australia. Between 0.7 and 0.9kg CO2e (13) 🥇
The differences in the scale of countries usually depend on which type of structure farm meat. Small-scale extensive farms tend to emit less CO2e than large-scale intensive farms.
But despite emitting less CO2e, the best-in-class meat still emits 4 times more than chickpeas or other sources of proteins, that can replace meat in your diet.
Moreover, pig meat and chicken have other negative impacts on the environment, highly due to intensive and industrial breeding. The main one is water pollution. High-nutrient-diets for pigs and chickens increase the level of nitrogen in water coming out of the farms and contaminate the sea. It creates issues of green algae in Brittany for example and can do harm to public health and biodiversity.
How can you improve the impact of your diet on the planet?
If the average household substitutes their calories from red meat and dairy with chicken once a week, they would save 300kg of CO2e. If they replaced it with plant-based alternatives they would save 460kg of CO2e (2). The IPCC reports that each human can emit 2 tons of CO2e per year to maintain global warming below +1.5°C. Right now, 🇫🇷 is 4.24t, 🇺🇸 is 14.24t, 🇨🇳 is 7.41, 🇧🇷 is 2.2t, 🇩🇪 is 7.69t. (3)
In other words, going red meat and dairy-free (not even meat-free) one day per week would achieve the same as a zero-food-mile diet. Reducing the consumption of other types of meats can improve even further your carbon footprint. Keep in mind that the best chicken still emits more than chickpeas or other plant proteins.
If we go deeper, meat is also terribly inefficient. For each kilogram of meat, between 10 and 25kg of cereals are eaten. Around 40% of cereals produced in the world are dedicated to breeding. Overall, these 800 million tons of cereals dedicated to breeding could feed 3.5 billion people (811 million people go hungry in 2022).
💡
Reduce your meat consumption, starting with red meat and dairy. You can find more food products and their environmental impact here, to better prioritize.
Reducing your meat consumption is hard, we’ve been through that. So we’ve built No Meat Today app📱to help you on your journey to eating less meat, whatever your motivations are.
Sources
(1) Alexander et al. (2016). Human appropriation of land for food: the role of diet. Global Environmental Change. OurWorldInData.org/meat-production
(2) Weber, C. L., & Matthews, H. S. (2008). Food-miles and the relative climate impacts of food choices in the United States. Environmental Science & Technology.
(3) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?time=latest
TACKLING CLIMATE CHANGE THROUGH LIVESTOCK (2013)