Zero waste motivation behind choosing Veganism – food for thought
/We’ve been on our zero waste journey for nearly 7 years now and have been slowly moving to a more plant based diet in that time too, mainly due to coincidence. At the same time as discovering Colin Beavan, No Impact Man and Lauren Singer of Trash is for Tossers we also discovered Ella Mills of Deliciously Ella and enjoyed her easy to follow plant based recipes. For us the move to plant based has been more focused on diet and nutrition but there was also the fact that it was much easier to find vegetables and plant based foods plastic free or in bulk than animal products, mainly meat or dairy that often came pre-wrapped in plastic, so the move to plant-based supported our move to zero waste and avoiding single use plastic. This Veganuary we thought we would look into the two movements a little more to see what the connections are between veganism and zero waste and if pursuing a zero waste lifestyle naturally leads to veganism.
We started exploring waste generated by agriculture. A survey carried out in England, 2003, showed us that 93% of all agricultural waste, 43 million tonnes, was manure and slurries waste, a result of animal farming. And on further digging it seems that the world is facing a poo issue. David Cox reported in the Guardian that ‘recent research has estimated that by 2030, the planet will be generating at least 5bn tonnes of poo each year, with the vast majority being deposited by livestock. … scientists say this is a major environment and health challenge. …With the UK’s cows already producing 36m tonnes in waste every year – enough to fill the Shard 78 times over – and many dairy farmers feeling the pinch from tumbling milk prices, safely disposing of these mounds of toxic mess is a serious and expensive conundrum. …Because most first world farming systems are highly concentrated, industrial operations, this produces very concentrated streams of waste. Unless these are dealt with rapidly, they can pollute the air with large amounts of harmful gases such as ammonia, nitrous oxide and hydrogen sulphide. …Unless more effective ways are found to deal with the increasing amounts of animal manure, some scientists predict that by 2050, large swathes of the country’s rivers will see a 100%-200% increase in phosphorus and nitrate pollution. …In 2006, the UN published a landmark report, titled Livestock’s Long Shadow, highlighting the serious environmental and health problems posed by the growing amounts of animal waste, and calling for urgent action. However, little progress is being made. …Small-scale projects are under way, such as the efforts of a team of scientists from the University of Vienna who are partnering with various farms across Europe and helping them convert animal poo into paper. But while the potential of new revenue streams could spur more farmers worldwide into taking action to deal with waste, there remains a dire need for new policies, initiatives and conferences to discuss how to deal with the impending problem on a large scale. …In 2016, the Environmental Journal castigated “governmental apathy” surrounding the problem. Three years on, little has changed.’
Unfortunately, intensive farming is on the rise in the UK. An article by The Bureau Investigates shows that the number of intensive poultry and pig farms licensed by the Environmental Agency has increased by a quarter in the last six years (report in 2017). There are nearly 1700 intensive farms currently licensed and many of them, nearly 800, are giant US-style mega farms, the biggest housing more than a million chickens, 20,000 pigs or 2,000 diary cows.
And as Charles Gerba writes in his paper ‘Wastewater Treatment and Biosolids Reuse’ ‘This shift in production methods has changed the age-old method of reincorporation of animal wastes as manure on the farm where it was produced. Specialization has largely divorced animal production from the production of crops: a concentrated animal facility may be located far from crop production, and the same family (or the same corporation) may not pursue the two types of production. The production of large numbers of animals on a small land base has resulted in the stockpiling of wastes at specific locations, the construction of large waste-storage ponds, and oftentimes, waste applications to land in excess of agronomic crop needs.’
These large storage facilities of manure and slurry often cause pollution, The Bureau Investigates writes that the Environment Agency warned in a recent report that the long term trend shows an increase in serious pollution incidents from agriculture, often caused by the storage, handling and spreading of waste, due to "lack of investment in infrastructure" or "inadequate planning and management of these substances".
If we’re being totally honest prior to doing this little bit of research we hadn’t really thought about the impacts of animal manure and it seems such a shame that a natural waste source has become too big for it to naturally be returned to its natural cycle of returning to the soil. From the information it seems that large scale farming is the root cause of this, its simply creating too much waste. A Foodprint article recommends making sure you buy your meat and diary from pasture-based farms, who do not have the same problems with waste management as they raise an appropriate number of animals that can be supported by the land; with the amount of manure proportional to the amount of soil and is an effective fertilizer, not a contaminant.
However, we came across an interesting article by George Monbiot for The Guardian who exposed some issues with pasture based farming that we hadn’t considered. Up to now this has been our little get out if we fancied meat or diary, we would make sure it came from small scale farms operating on a pasture fed basis. He writes that ‘grazing is not just slightly inefficient; it is stupendously wasteful. Roughly twice as much of the world’s surface is used for grazing as for growing crops, yet animals fed entirely on pasture produce just one gram out of the 81g of protein consumed per person per day. …Replacing the meat in our diets with soya spectacularly reduces the land area required per kilo of protein: by 70% in the case of chicken, 89% in the case of pork and 97% in the case of beef. One study suggests that if we were all to switch to a plant-based diet, 15m hectares of land in Britain currently used for farming could be returned to nature. Alternatively, this country could feed 200 million people. An end to animal farming would be the salvation of the world’s wildlife, our natural wonders and magnificent habitats.’
Definitely a strong argument for veganism and zero waste.
Another Guardian article points us in the same direction, Damian Carrington in 2018 writes that ‘new analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Other recent research shows 86% of all land mammals are now livestock or humans. The scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.’
One Green Planet gave us some more stats on how a plant based diet is more efficient (and therefore less wasteful) than an animal based one:
The production of one calorie of animal protein requires more than ten times the fossil fuel input as a calorie of plant protein. (The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition)
It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat and only 25 gallons to produce one pound of wheat (“Water Inputs in California Food Production” by Marcia Kreith)
To produce a day’s food for one meat-eater takes over 4,000 gallons; for a lacto-ovo vegetarian, only 1200 gallons; for a vegan, only 300 gallons (The Vegetarian Times Complete Cookbook)
The world’s cattle alone consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people—more than the entire human population on Earth (“The Global Benefits of Eating Less Meat” by Mark Gold and Jonathon Porritt)
So it definitely looks as though moving away from meat and dairy and adopting a plant based vegan diet supports a zero waste lifestyle, but what about fish, any issues there?
Our first thought when thinking about fishing and zero waste, is plastic pollution, one of the main motivations behind choosing a zero waste lifestyle.
A report by Greenpeace tells us that lost and abandoned fishing gear makes up the majority of large plastic pollution in the oceans, ‘more than 640,000 tonnes of nets, lines, pots and traps used in commercial fishing are dumped and discarded in the sea every year, the same weight as 55,000 double-decker buses. Ghost gear is estimated to make up 10% of ocean plastic pollution but forms the majority of large plastic littering the waters. One study found that as much as 70% (by weight) of macroplastics (in excess of 20cm) found floating on the surface of the ocean was fishing related. A recent study of the “great Pacific garbage patch”, an area of plastic accumulation in the north Pacific, estimated that it contained 42,000 tonnes of megaplastics, of which 86% was fishing nets.’
So it seems that removing fish from your diet could have a big positive impact on ocean plastic pollution and therefore be a key motivator behind a lifestyle that is looking to avoid adding to plastic pollution.
Even before doing this little bit of research it felt as though veganism supported a zero waste lifestyle and having found out this information it has given us even more motivation to be even more plant focused with our diets. The one area that is an issue that we have found comes down to packaging. Lots of vegan alternatives are often packaged in plastic but we have found that most of these are easy to make for yourself at home from scratch, enabling you to avoid single use plastic packaging.
We’ll finish with some inspiring words from Andrew Krosofsky written for Greenmatters ‘It seems that the act of going vegan is, in and of itself, in line with the core values of zero-waste living. While both lifestyles may present a few challenges, neither is about being perfect, but about doing your best. You can choose to do what works for you, as even small actions can make a big difference across a human lifetime. So do your part, however you can.’ We wholeheartedly agree with this statement. We are big fans of starting from where you are and doing what you can in any given moment.
For the meat fans out there, it looks as though technology could be looking to help in the form of lab grown meat. Founders of companies such as Memphis Meats and Finless Foods are looking to replace intensive farms with lab grown meat. The technology still has some way to go and is not without its environmental impacts but it certainly sounds interesting to us!
We hope that this has given some food for thought on your zero waste journey, it certainly has for us!
Resources:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-fishing-gear-is-biggest-plastic-polluter-in-ocean-finds-report
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/04/factory-farming-destructive-wasteful-cruel-says-philip-lymbery-farmageddon-author
https://foodprint.org/issues/what-happens-to-animal-waste/
https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/facts-on-animal-farming-and-the-environment/
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/mar/25/animal-waste-excrement-four-billion-tonnes-dung-poo-faecebook
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-08-21/farming-pollution-fish-uk
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-07-17/megafarms-uk-intensive-farming-meat
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/animal-waste
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/291600/geho0003bieo-e-e.pdf
https://www.ciwm.co.uk/ciwm/knowledge/agricultural-waste.aspx
https://www.greenmatters.com/p/veganism-zero-waste-eating
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/04/animal-agriculture-choking-earth-making-sick-climate-food-environmental-impact-james-cameron-suzy-amis-cameron
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/04/livestock-farming-artificial-meat-industry-animals
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/20/lab-grown-meat-fish-feed-the-world-frankenmeat-startups
