A new study out from Carnegie Mellon examines the carbon footprint of distance-shipped food. Turns out, eating locally will help a bit, but a changing what you eat is more important than where what you eat comes from.
…the prudent environmentalist will eat local in order to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. Intuitively, that makes a lot of sense. Bananas shipped from Brazil can’t be good for the environment. But two Carnegie Mellon researchers recently broke down the carbon footprint of foods, and their findings were a bit surprising. 83 percent of emissions came from the growth and production of the food itself. Only 11 percent came from transportation, and even then, only 4 percent came from the transportation between grower and seller (which is the part that eating local helps cut). Additionally, food shipped from far off may be better for the environment than food shipped within the country — ocean travel is much more efficient than trucking.
May 12, 2010 at 8:11 pm
[...] Meat Making Us Sick? By Scott I’m a firm believer that nothing should be sacred. If Carnegie-Mellon says buying local vegetables only shaves 4% off the carbon footprint, I can live with that. I’ll [...]