Number of the Day
What Chickens Have to Do With Climate Change, by the Numbers
Startups are working to replace America’s favorite meat
360 million tons: That’s how much greenhouse gas emissions the global poultry industry produces every year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, per Future Human.
The Future Human story by Andrew Zaleski centers on a startup that aims to produce plant-based alternatives to chicken on an industrial scale. While beef is notorious for its climate impacts, ranking first among foods for its greenhouse gas emissions (2.9 billion tons a year), the poultry industry’s emissions are not insignificant. And these direct greenhouse gas emissions are only a partial accounting of the industry’s environmental impact: The use of chicken excrement as fertilizer causes air pollution by sending nitrous oxide and ammonia into the atmosphere, and water pollution in the form of nitrogen runoff into waterways (6 million pounds of nitrogen pollution from poultry farms in Pennsylvania went into the Chesapeake Bay in 2018 alone).
Given that chicken is by far the most-consumed meat in the United States, accounting for more than a third of meat consumption in the country, a plant-based chicken substitute that gains popularity would do a…
