Some data on food footprints. We need more of this

robinsmith3

website team CRAGger Islington Leeds Wokingham WSP

I’m looking at the benefits of Biomass for energy production. Though its closely related the additional costs of energy for making the fuel are not there as they are for biodiesel and ethanol, so its in the ball park for sustainability still. Efficiency is about 25% versus 50% respectively

So grow Biomass for energy production not Biofuel for transport

Even then I cant see it supply more than 5-10% of electricity demand, but at least its something to add into the mix

This brings up an interesting factor, that almost all low carbon energy supply generates electricity. It begs the question, will total future sustainable energy supply be electricity? Not necessarilly a bad thing

robinsmith3

website team CRAGger Islington Leeds Wokingham WSP

Points taken and understood. I’m not taking sides here, just searching for the truth and this is what I assume all Craggers are doing. So I will support it if its true, else I’m sorry.

The wider benefits of organic farming are noble and could be the way forward. And organic farming its claimed takes many more times land use and uses up 25% more energy for certain goods here. So the additional emissions are by no means slight depending on the lifecycle costs.

The climate impact is at the bottom of the survival chain. All else, even though important is secondary… In my opinion of course (:

So the truth rather than the politics, emotion or ideology makes more sense?

The point for me is that there is an awful lot of heresay and emotion involved in presenting cases for and against certain “sustainable” approaches to the environment.

I have to support Robin’s view in that most people (i.e.the 80% plus of the population who are not CRAG members) do not understand what is fact and what is fiction when it comes to the environment. I have to say the press have a lareg responsibility to bear here but, so do the people who give interviews to the Press as so called expert opinion.

More importantly we assume that people who are members of environmental groups also know all the facts. This is simply not true. Most environmental arguments are still being ‘bottommed out’. My p[oint I gues is that we need to be careful to be factual where possible!

david

website team CRAGger Sevenoaks

It doesn’t seem productive debating the trade-offs between ghg and non-ghg environmental impacts of organic, until you can really establish its true footprint. Peter’s point about fertiliser producton is a good one, the Haber process uses large amounts of energy. You can never know unless you have a good number of studies, all reasonably tranpsarent about their assumptions and their boundaries. There’s a reasonable exploration of this at http://www.gdrc.org/uem/lca/life-cycle.html.

What’s your source for this, Robin? Perhaps we can track down the study they are using.

robinsmith3

website team CRAGger Islington Leeds Wokingham WSP

See here for full article: http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2283928.ece

I was reading it in Nero’s. I need to get a life!

You should also read the Economist article on Ethical food which goes into the impacts(claimed) of organic, local and fairtrade. The last response on this forum I got on it was suprisingly defensive. And I get exactly the same resposne from all others I have engaged on the topic within the repsective industries. They were all alleged experts, farmers etc!

Getting to the bottom of this will always be difficult if all who are responsible for delivering the truth refuse to enter the debate because its uncomforatble, or refuse to step outside of their normal political/ideological comfort zone. This is a tough thing to do for anyone but that does not mean you should defer action awaiting 100% proof.

I think there is enough here now to stop wasting time proving the source and to move forward by asking the difficult questions. I seem to remember the last time I hade a similar challenge was fighting off the climate change deniers. Remember that?

R

david

website team CRAGger Sevenoaks

Thanks for digging that up, Robin – sorry if it took some time.

The report it is based on, “Impacts of food production and consumption” (summary, full report) is looking at the overall environmental impacts of different types of food. It is quite difficult to strip out the climate impacts, but you could check Table 1 (p12-13) in columns “Energy Use Impact” and “Non-CO2 Global Warming Impacts”. There are also such gems as the global warming potential for different forms of carrots (p.49) – I shouldn’t laugh, really!

In general, climate footprints seem to be lower for organic carbohydrates and meat (except poultry), but higher for organic dairy. On overall environmental impacts, the report finds “no clear-cut answer” for organic vs. conventional, and weak evidence for local vs. global. This area seems very grey.

Perhaps the resistance you’ve encountered, Robin, is down to the very personal nature of food choice, and the entrenchment of a global food culture in this country. I totally agree that we should be prepared to step outside our comfort zones. It can be uncomfortable when reports like this throw cold, hard light on some cherished environmentalist assumptions (that’s not to say they’re necessarily wrong, though).

robinsmith3

website team CRAGger Islington Leeds Wokingham WSP

Not at all.. and thx for taking time to looking deeper.

Its a good analysis about meat & carbs versus dairy & veg(!). Thats great output if as it seems its broadly reasonable to assume true. So we’ve got somewhere. Maybe others already did but its not obvious.

Yup! Food and the UK culture is certainly a personal thing judging by the aggressive response I’ve had from organic farmers. Borderline protectionism put less prudently. Its a bit like the response the world got when NZ’s livelihood was unjustly put under threat from the initial food miles campaign levelled against them. The difference there was that the NZ response was largely bourne out to be in their favour.

Give me some time to go through the report in full and report back my takeaways. I know its asking a lot but if someone else did the same it wouldnt be just my view?

R

andy_ross

website team CRAGger Glasgow Leamington

Another defra report on the narrower subject of food miles can be found at

http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/reports/foodmiles/default.asp

Lots of interesting nuggets in the exec summary including:

“Although air freight of food accounts for only 1% of food tonne kilometres and 0.1% of vehicle kilometres, it produces 11%
of the food transport CO2 equivalent emissions.”

robinsmith3

website team CRAGger Islington Leeds Wokingham WSP

It begs the question: Why buy non durable goods out of season. Was having this conversation with, shall we say a lady, who was mortified when I suggested flowers are not on the menu out of season!!!

Felt my ears burning – sorry to have been out of the loop for a while.
Only last week i was debating this very thing with a man from Defra who told me of this ‘less energy to produce non organic chickens’ business.

This is contrary to the ‘Action plan to develop organic food and farming in England’ DEFRA, July 2002, which found that : “organic farms use between 15 – 30% less energy than non-organic farms to produce the same amount of food”

There are a number of things we have to be careful of. I would firstly ask the question are we comparing like with like ?- it’s certainly not the case with the chickens -I understand the main reason the non organic can come out having used less energy is because they can be slaughtered much younger, and are kept in intensive flocks, gaining an economy of scale. An organic chicken must be kept until it is older, therefore it eats more – and less birds per acre, on the face of it,uses more energy, but there is an animal welfare issue when considering age of slaughter and stocking densities.

Also, organic soils offer better carbon sequestration in the soil – while intensive farming causes soil erosion, organic soil builds fertility, and holds on to carbon.
The Soil Association web site states: Soils contain about twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. However, scientists have discovered that soil is losing its carbon content on a large scale. It is estimated that 13 million tonnes (Mt) of carbon are being lost from the UK’s soils each year.

I would also ask if the data has done a full lifecycle analysis on pesticides (production costs, and costs of cleaning up residues)and nitrogen fertilisers – which cause methane emissions in their production, and nitrous oxide emissions in their use (both potent GHG’s but which would not measure as CO2)

A good report on this is ‘An assessment of the total external costs of UK agriculture, 2000, Pretty, Brett, Gee, Hine, Mason, Morison, Raven, Rayment and van der Bilj’. The argument put forward is that if all externalities were considered, which are not currently attributed directly to farming and food production, then our view of farming practice and food sourcing would have to change significantly. This report is not specifically about carbon, but takes an overview of the impacts of farming and food – this is a more sustainable approach than just measuring CO2 impact.

What it points out to me is that we must understand the context of food production – its not just an energy issue – bio-diversity, landscape diversity, local culture, animal welfare, human health, etc. has to be considered as well. (doesnt really help us get data does it?, but as rightly pointed out in this forum, data can be swung either way to suit a purpose.

(The ‘Food Climate Research Network’ is a good resource for those wanting to look in to it more – good on data!)

cheers P x

robinsmith3

website team CRAGger Islington Leeds Wokingham WSP

Pete thanks for the useful data points

Its dawning on me that due to all the complexities and vested interests that downstream (consumer led) accounting of food emissions will never fly.

Perhaps the only way to account for carbon emissions in food is sourced based accounting of food emissions at all points of production and delivery, ie through the ETS or dare I say it a carbon tax. Roadblocks?

1) International (tricky as usual)
2) ETS for supermarkets and food producers
3) Smaller food outlets and delivery co’s (no proposed cover by any cap & trade system yet)

Again my personal primary goal is emissions reduction. Cultures, religions, tribes, history and other important factors mean a lot but take second place. I welcome any arguments on this point.

R

It’s certainly proving difficult to measure – I’ll be interested in how the likes of Tesco manage to ‘carbon label’ their products which they have said they will do.

Through Herefordshire Food Links , we are looking in to an environmental benchmarking system which would go some way towards measuring the energy use of individual farms, (something not yet done by any of the existing accreditation organisations, Soil Association etc.) but this will still be very problematic to include in any emissions figures for food production. After all, in a rotation, how much is attributed to each product, products often go on in to co-operative marketing (milk for example) etc.etc. How much can one farm count as an offset by the carbon retained through good soil management etc. But certainly, it involves starting at a farm level and then tracing energy use throughout the supply chain (quite a task).

When i talk about culture, i mean it in a broad sense – cultural relationships with food have come about for many reasons, but if you trace it back, it could be argued that certain types of food production have come about as a result of geographical constraints / advantages, which has consequently determined the culture. This is what i mean by context.
Looking at pure data, one could assume that vegetable derived protein is more energy efficient, so we should all be vegetarian -but to use my favourite example, try growing soya beans on the side of a Welsh mountain – so Welsh Lamb is the protein food of choice for that area.
Adding a wider environmental context, permanent pasture (such as river flood meadow), is good grazing – and it would cause both soil erosion, (including carbon loss), river silting (resulting in damage to aquatic bio-diversity, and increased flooding), if it were ploughed to grow crops. Here we see the importance of localised solutions, and my sense is that ‘localisation’, not only of food but of energy generation, waste management etc. offers us the only real possiblilty of long term solutions. Frankly, my belief is that we will never solve our energy crisis through centralised systems (food or otherwise).

So data won’t be easy to come by. However, some things are pretty clear.

Fertiliser and pesticides have a high energy and environmental cost
Transport has a high CO2 and congestion cost
Packaging has a high energy and disposal cost
Refrigeration has a high energy cost
Growing under heated glass / plastic has a high energy cost

this suggests to me – organic, locally souced, minimally packaged, fresh, and seasonal

Right I’m off to eat a hot pot of organic Herefordshire Lamb with leeks and tatties. mmmm.

cheers

P x

robinsmith3

website team CRAGger Islington Leeds Wokingham WSP

Have you read the New Zealand report on food miles. And the Economist article on Food Politics. I keep posting them here, not sure if anyone has had time to read them. Some compelling facts, some not. And “food” for thought.

Data not being easily available currently favours the ethical food lobby over the climate issue. This worries me a lot as you know. Tesco if they execute on their promise will bring this out into the open I hope. I predict it will go political very quickly.

I’d say the word “Local” is moot. Key is reduced emissions for me. So if I ship a kg of lamb from NZ and its less emissions than for UK lamb, then we should do it. Protectionism should not be allowed to sway the facts. Remember the Common Agricultural Policy? Same applies to the economies of scale for energy. So if centralised electricity emits 5gCO2/kWh and local energy has a footprint of 10gCO2/kWh, then centralised is what we should do. But we digress (:

Best
R

andy_ross

website team CRAGger Glasgow Leamington

This may not be to everyone’s taste (!) but living very close to an M&S foodhall I have discovered the shame and joy of skip food. Shame because so much perfectly good grub gets binned every day. Joy because there is always something tasty to take home! And it cuts down on pointless landfill methane too!

6.7m tonnes of food is wasted each year in the UK. My back of fag packet calc says that’s about 150kgCO2e per person.

John Cossham

CRAGger York

I do a lot of voluntary composting, from a greengrocers, a cafe and an ‘ethical’ supermarket, and take in neighbours’ compostables they can’t be bothered to compost.
I regularly (3 times a week) take home (in bike trailer of course!) out of date, unsold and unwanted food. I eat well and am sometimes able to distribute food to friends and volunteers at a local environment centre, as well as bring snacky things to events like committee meetings (out of date chocolate!) I also dry loads of fruit on my 2 ‘Clearview’ smokefree woodstoves, so I too am very aware how wasteful the system is.
What I want to know is, how do I put this in my carbon calcs? Does all this recycling, taking stuff out of the waste stream and certain landfill, help reduce my C footprint? As my measured tonnages are in the range of 1 to 1.5 tonnes/year from home heating and transport, I’m curious about the tonnes of stuff I recycle (literally, it’s over 100kg/week!) and whether this might even result in my having a negative footprint?
Or is my logic all wrong here?
yours in composting heaven, John Cossham, York CRAG, York Rotters, York Green Festival, etc etc

robinsmith3

website team CRAGger Islington Leeds Wokingham WSP

I say yes to that. Its up to your CRAG to decide.

There is some data on this forum about kg CO2 per food item I wrote and also also recylcing footprint. Also about 3g per litre for water comnsumption

Recycling generaly represents about 2% of uk emissions. Not enough to justify the spin around it. Recycling is primarily a sustianability issue from landfill. For the councils its firstly a revenue thing as they have landfill quotas much like rationing.

R

robinsmith3

website team CRAGger Islington Leeds Wokingham WSP

Blimey you really are turning into Swampy! Whats your favourite sarny then?

Numbers look good, mine are a bit higher. 2 tonnes for food production * about 25% wasted = 500kg?

I too had a horrible experience like that at Waterloo recently about 10PM on way home. M&S was about to close and they were literally filling a huge skip with lovely food. Only thing wrong with it was it was going out of date. It was fine though. At the same time people were still buying stuff on the shelf. The manager was not interested, more concerned with not giving it to street folks or not selling it cheap. We are probably too wealthy to fix this disgrace. Nothing wrong with wealth, just our behaviour. And yet another totaly irrational western fear about food scares to add to the others ?

robinsmith3

website team CRAGger Islington Leeds Wokingham WSP

See here for some article on throing stuff away:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2156799,00.html

Jessica

website team CRAGger Islington

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329987988-103680,00.html

Jessica R

despina

CRAGger Leeds

Statement from Plamil Organics:

All The Soya Beans that are used in our Organic soya Milk are grown in France, in fields that have been cultivated for Organic crop use.

david

website team CRAGger Sevenoaks

I have looked into soya supply over the biofuels issue, and I think it’s likely that any soya, sustainable or not, just displaces land demand elsewhere (ie into rainforest), if the overall demand for soya is growing. In this sense, it’s difficult to say any individual soya batch is “sustainable” in terms of overall land demand, but that term may refer to growing practices – it’s difficult to tell.

despina

CRAGger Leeds

Isn’t that the same with anything you eat? Is soya more space demanding than other foods? My problem with soya milk is that it’s energy demanding to produce and it comes in tetrapaks.

I don’t know about the energy required to produce soya milk, but you can recycle tetrapaks, either if your local council provides this facility (none used to, now some do) or if you post them, currently, an address in Somerset; it was Fife.

See: http://www.tetrapakrecycling.co.uk/index.htm

(Admittedly, this is info from the tetrapak industry, but I find their argument about the energy benefits in transporting tetrapaks, and in recycling them, persuasive. I’d be interested to know what other people here think.)

Guy S

website team CRAGger Islington

Defra’s research paper, ‘Environmental Impacts of Food Production and Consumption’, has this to say about soya milk:
“Soya milk relies on the harvesting of soybeans (mainly grown in North America) and considerably more processing (e.g. peeling, grinding, filtering, adding sugar and flavours) than conventional or alternative fat content milks. Hence it is difficult to compare the product system of soya milk to that of cow’s milk; it is more akin to that of fruit juice.”
See http://www.defra.gov.uk/science/project_data/DocumentLibrary/EV02007/EV0….

In terms of soya generally, though, it’s an efficient crop – very high in protein, though with possible nutrition problems relating to the presence of certain minerals which affect digestion (as well as a recent health scare over oestrogen and soy). Soya milk is also, I think, low in calcium so can’t be a perfect substitute for cow’s milk – some soy milk brands have added calcium (hence more processing, which presumably adds to the environmental impacts).

Dairy products (milk, cheese, butter) are all considered to have a pretty high climate impact, with Defra listing them as second highest contributors after meat products. (The Defra report puts dairy as accounting for around 5% of total global warming potential across the European Union, with ‘meat, poultry and related products’ at around 12%.)

Still, people are right to be suspicious of soya sourced from Brazil. The food giant Cargill, in particular, has been implicated in establishing soya plantations which have cleared large swathes of rainforest (see http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/releases/cargill-s-controv…). Needless to say, this kinda cancels out the beneficial effects of that crop of soya.

According to the Container Recycling Institute¹, in 2005, 7 billion plastic bottles were wasted with a replacement cost of 3.7 million barrels of crude oil. That means 3.7 million barrels of crude * 42 gallons per barrel / 7 billion plastic bottles, or .0222 gallons crude/bottle. I am not sure how you figure out the emissions exactly- if you would count the crude used in the plastic itself or just as a byproduct of the production process.

robinsmith3

website team CRAGger Islington Leeds Wokingham WSP

Carbon trust put a label on bottles of shampoo of about 150g

angelaelizabeth

CRAGger Redland Bristol

This is a very interesting thread, and I have no expertise to add, except the discovery of solid shampoo bars. Sounds pathetic I know but we’ve gradually changed lots of our shopping habits to minimise waste packaging, so we buy loose, or refills, or do without (eg white vinegar substitutes for loads of cleaning products). But got stumped by plastic bottled shampoo until my kids gave me a bar of lush shampoo for christmas – no packaging, size of a small soap bar, reckon it’ll last me all year. Ordinary shampoo is another version of bottled water.
Angela
Bristol
www.sustainableredland.org.uk

david

website team CRAGger Sevenoaks

Hi Josiah, I absolutely agree that CO2-only footprints for food are pretty meaningless, especially given the massive contribution of livestock methane. I guess often when we say “carbon”, we really mean carbon dioxide equivalent, for the whole basket.

It is sufficient for many direct emissions (heating, transport etc), though, involving burning fossil fuel directly. Once we start getting into food and other areas, the life-cycle complexities starting building up and make it more and more difficult to apply a simple carbon currency. This will probably still hold however much research you do. Casting a wider net means values start getting involved (eg. what is the relative worth of such-and-such an aspect), and undermines the value of a common currency.

Our obsession with quantification must divert our attention away from less direct impacts. However, I’d still contend it’s useful for helping us deal with some aspects. There is the danger of starting to regard it as a catch-all, so perhaps we should use carbon footprints only in combination with more holistic measures, such as WWF’s land-based ecological footprint. All the same caveats must apply there, too, though.

My reading of a recent article in New Scientist

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19926731.700-what-is…

is that the carbon footprints even of an individual foodstuff [say potatoes] vary by so much within that category, due mainly to different production methods, that it isn’t possible to meaningfully quantify the carbon footprints of individual foodstuffs.

Whilst I can see that we use average emissions for some activities already [e.g. public transport conversion factors based on averages over all times of day], I wonder whether such averages can be meaningful for individual foodstuffs. If not, this might be an argument in favour of including food in a cap and share type scheme.

shane

website team CRAGger Bedford

This study shows it’s good to have some animal products in your diet; larger footprint but more people can be fed over a smaller space due to some land being better suited to grazing.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Oct07/diets.ag.footprint.sl.html

they suggest 6 acres per person is most efficient (5 for veg only), with world population at 6,753,954,370 × 6 acres = 40,523,726,220 acres needed if we all ate the most efficient diet.

How much land is available for food farming? how much land is needed for non essential non food crops? how much land would be left over? if any. we could work out a best case scenario for leaving land for;
wildlife
energy crops
non essential crops

i’m a veggie by the way, not promoting meat.

shane

website team CRAGger Bedford

i just found this widget that gives the world population and productive land clock. it’s a little disconcerting because they’re going in opposite directions.
http://www.google.co.uk/ig/directory?hl=en&type=gadgets&url=andrewgadget…
anyway the clock has productive land at 8,555,000,000 hectares (1 hectare = 2.471 acres) or 21,139,405,000

if that were true we’d already have a short fall of almost 50% of the land we need to supply the most efficient diet.

am i missing something or is it really that bad?

Shane