How Is The Food Industry Affecting The World’s Climate Emergency?
With talks of tackling climate change mainly being focused on energy and transport, other causes are being overlooked. One of these other causes is the food industry, which accounts for over a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. The food industry causes pollution through 3 key factors. These are:
Food Packaging
When buying food either from fast food or supermarkets, it comes packaged in all different types of materials. This happens even if some manufacturers use corn and other plant based materials. Most are extremely bad for the environment.
Due to these materials, most packaging is single use and usually thrown away rather than recycled. This results in almost half of all solid waste coming from food packaging. The pollution, however, starts at the very beginning of the food packaging process. Making these single use packages uses a lot of energy, water and chemicals. Throughout this process, the factories produce greenhouse gasses and wastewater containing toxic chemicals.
Land Use
With half the world’s habitable land being used for agriculture, another form of pollution is land pollution. With livestock and crops requiring fields, this means that forests, grasslands and other carbon sinks need to be converted into farmland, which obviously destroys the carbon sink (the plants and places that take carbon dioxide from the air), but also uses machines that produce greenhouse gases.
Livestock and Fisheries
Animals raised for consumption purposes aid in producing toxic emissions in many ways, with 31% of food emissions coming from this. Cattle produce methane gasses through their digestive system, and all the fuel used in the machines used for fishing vessels and manure management also contribute to this percentage.
Conclusion
In conclusion, our food industry is one of the largest causes for our global crisis and it should not be overlooked. With farming producing a large amount of greenhouse gases, and the unsustainable packaging aiding this pollution, we need to reduce our damage to the planet. We can do this by encouraging companies to use reusable / eco friendly packaging. On top of this, we can also focus on our diets and reduce our spending on these planet destroying foods.
Sources:
- ourworldindata.org
- foodprint.org
