Environment

Reduce your impact on the environment

Thanks to countless reports on the subject, it is now accepted that animal agriculture is one of the most damaging industries to the environment.

Animal agriculture is responsible for around 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions (2, 4, 5) – a typical meat eater is responsible for the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes more CO2 every year than the standard vegan (6). A kilogram of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of CO2 emitted by the average European car every 250 kilometres, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days (13).

We also now know that cutting meat out of the diet is far more effective for reducing your carbon footprint than the popular ‘eat local’ theory (28). “A completely local diet would reduce a household’s greenhouse emissions by an amount equivalent to driving a car 1,600 km less per year. Switching from red meat to veggies just one day per week would spare 1,860 km of driving” (28). And this is just for switching to veggies one day per week, do it every day and that makes it equivalent to 13,020 km less of driving – almost the same amount of km an average American drives per year.

It takes 78 calories of fossil fuels to produce 1 kg of beef, and only 2 to produce 1kg of soy.

Protect the forests

70% of the land in the Amazon which was previously forest is used as pasture for livestock and a large percentage of the rest is used to grow crops to feed animals raised for meat (2). This not only impacts climate change, as rainforests are ‘carbon sinks’, but also means thousands of species of animals become extinct every year in these biodiversity rich habitats.

The impact of animal agriculture on the Amazon is well documented and recognised as the leading cause of deforestation (1, 10, 30, 31). The mass destruction of forest to make way for soy plantations is a growing concern due to the increased demand from biofuels, however, let us not forget that currently 90% of the world soy is fed to cows, chickens and other animals raised for meat, dairy and eggs.

Water

The meat industry also uses a substantial amount of one of our most precious resources: water (7). 8% of human water use is related to the livestock sector, 7% of which is for the irrigation of crops grown to feed animals (2). Whilst it takes 1,000 litres to produce 1kg of grain, it takes 10,000 litres to produce 1kg of meat (38), and this figure does not include all the water required during the slaughter and processing. The dairy industry also uses a huge amount of water. It is estimated that one gallon of milk requires as much as 2,000 gallons of water (40). When you consider that dairy cows drink around 50 gallons of water per day and then also take in to account all the water needed to grow the crops to feed the cows and then the water needed for cleaning and processing, that figure doesn’t seem quite so shocking.

Animal agriculture also creates soil erosion and water and land pollution (18).

Read about climate change as a violation of human rights.

Sustainable and efficient use of our land

It would take just 3 million hectares of arable land to meet Britain‘s food needs, half the current total, if the population were vegan (43).

Stop destroying the planet. Go vegan.