Vegetarianisms impact on environment

Living a vegetarian lifestyle has many fantastic benefits for our health but have you ever considered how it impacts the environment?

 

Being vegetarian means you are not contributing to the process required to produce meat including the extensive use of land, fuel, and water. Studies have found human eat twice as much meat as we did 30 years ago. All of these animals require vast amounts of food and water, emit methane and other greenhouse gases and create physical waste. 

 

Here are some facts that demonstrate the effectiveness of being vegetarian on the environment:

1. Eating a veggie diet means 2.5 x less carbon emissions than a meat diet.
2. A chicken breast takes over 735 litres of water to produce, that could fill up your bathtub 4.6 times.
3. By eating vegetarian food for a year you could save the same amount of emissions as a family taking a small car off the road for 6 months.

 

Still need more convincing? Here are some of the key vegetarian environmental benefits:

 

Requires less land

Agriculture takes up half of the world’s habitable land. Livestock accounts for about 80% of global agricultural land but produces less than 20% of the world’s calories. Meanwhile, plants continue to supply us with more calories and protein, even though they only take up 23% of habitable land.

 

Produces fewer emissions

Animal produce methane, nitrous oxide, and other gasses that pollute the air, warm the earth, and accelerate climate change. Cows are the worst culprit by far, emitting four times more greenhouse gases per calorie than pigs or chickens. Whereas like trees, crops produce oxygen, which is incredibly beneficial to the environment. The entire process of producing, packaging, and transporting meat also produces more emissions than it does to process plants.

 

Now you can be satisfied about the health and environmental benefits of being vegetarian.