Happy Earth day!
Did you know that just by not eating meat you would make a huge impact on the environment? The number one thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is to go vegan! Wasted land, food, water, and energy, deforestation and biodiversity loss, water and air pollution are just a few of the environmental issues associated with factory farming and the meat industry.
There are 3 primary gases responsible for global warming: Carbon Dioxide, Methane and Nitrous Oxide.
- If 1 person exchanged meat for a Vegan diet, they will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 1.50 tons per year!
- If every American dropped 1 serving of chicken per week, it would save the same amount of CO2 emissions as taking 500,000 cars off the road!
- Chickens, turkeys , pigs and cows are collectively the largest producer of methane in the US!
- Methane is 20x more powerful at trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere than carbon dioxide!
- The meat, egg and dairy industries produce 65% of world wide nitrous oxide emissions!
- Nitrous oxide is 300x more powerful at trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere than carbon dioxide!
- The diet of meat eaters creates 7x the greenhouse emissions as the diets of vegans!
Water and waste issues: Nearly half of all water used in the U.S goes to raising animals for food! Entire oceanic ecosystems are on the brink of collapse from the commercial fishing industry, which indiscriminately pulls as many fish as it can out of the sea. These reckless methods cause ecological devastation , push marine species to the brink of extinction , and kill other animals that are not being targeted, wasting countless lives.
- Takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce 1 lb. of meat.....25 gallons for 1 lb. of wheat.
- You would save more water by not taking a shower by not eating 1lb of meat than you would by not taking a shower for 6 months!
- A vegan diet requires 300 gallons of water per day vs. meat eating diet which requires 4,000 gallons per day
- Animals raised from food create 89,000 pounds of excrement per second! Chicken , hog and cattle excrement has polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states!
Where does all their poop go??
Using up so much land: Live stock grazing is the number one cause of plant species becoming threatened or going extinct in the U.S.!
- Raising animals for food uses 30% of earth's land mass! That's about the same size as Asia! That is about 17 million sq miles....the entire moon is 14.6 million sq miles!
- More than 260 million acres of the U.S. forest have been cleared to create crop land to grow grain to feed farmed animals!
- The equivalent of 7 football fields of land are bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals!
Food: Why is raising animals for food so inefficient? Animals eat large quantities of grain, soybeans , oats, and corn ; however, they only produce a comparatively small amount of meat , dairy products or eggs in return.
- 70% of grain and cereals grown in U.S. are used to feed farmed animals!
- It requires 16 lbs of grains to produce 1 lb of meat.
- 5 lbs of wild-caught fish to produce 1 lb of farmed fish.
