Impacts of Meat Consumption on the Environment

There is a huge and severe range of negative environmental impacts where the raising of livestock, and consumption of meat products is concerned. These impacts included mass pollution by industrial farms, and severe destruction of marine ecosystems through commercial fishing, there are many other impacts as well and this section is dedicated to exploring and explaining some of them at surface value. The goal of this page, as with the rest of the website is to provide more information to allow for informed decision making, and is certainly not to advocate strict vegetarianism or veganism in so much as to be make you aware of the impacts of buying everyday objects, in this case meat.

There are a few different types of pollution which occur through the production of meat. They are greenhouse gasses released by fuel consumption and in addition, those produced by the animals themselves.

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     Effluent waste is another large issue, that is contamination of groundwater and rivers with animal waste, the Walkerton Tragedy of 2000 in Ontario can serve as an example to why effluent waste can be harmful. The Walkerton Tragedy was a case of E. Coli contamination in municipal drinking water resulting in 7 deaths and more than 2300 cases of illness. The contamination was traced to a local cattle farm which had failed to fully restrict effluent waste.

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     Beyond pollution there is also the issue of Land and water consumption. Livestock are reared using a huge amount of resources, food, water and land are all consumed in huge amounts. To use a real-life example, cows, and beef use the equivalent of 164 M2 of land 1.7 M3 of water, and produce 6.2 kg of CO2 equivalent gasses, per 100g of protein they produce on average. What this means is that an average cow, which can produce about 430 lbs of meat (195, 045 grams) uses the equivalent of 3.19 KM2 ­land, 3315.8 M3 of Water, and produces 12.1 metric tons of CO2­ equivalent gasses.

Sources:

Poore, J., and T. Nemecek. “Reducing Food’s Environmental Impacts through Producers and Consumers.” Science, vol. 360, no. 6392, June 2018, pp. 987–92. science.sciencemag.org, doi:10.1126/science.aaq0216.

Salvadori, Marina I., et al. “Factors That Led to the Walkerton Tragedy.” Kidney International, vol. 75, Feb. 2009, pp. S33–34. ScienceDirect, doi:10.1038/ki.2008.616.

To create some perspective, the impacts of meat production, and its consumption are so severe that they have been credited as primary drivers of our extinction crisis by the UNIPBES (United Nations Intergovernmental Science Policy platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services). This reinforces and corroborates reports released as early as the 2006 UN Food and Agriculture organizations Livestock’s Long Shadow.

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     A brief explanation of the sixth mass extinction is that it is a mass extinction event dubbed the Holocene Extinction and its existence is credited to the negative impact of human activities in the environment. The extinction crisis is called as such because the current rate of extinction of species is as much as 1000 times higher than what can be considered the background rate of extinction. This means there are multiple species going extinct, Literally every day.

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     Source:

The Extinction Crisis. https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/elements_of_biodiversity/extinction_crisis/.

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