Comparing the Environmental Impacts of Meatless and Meat-Containing Meals in the United States

Abstract

This study compares the environmental impacts of meatless and meat-containing meals in the United States according to consumption data in order to identify commercial opportunities to lower environmental impacts of meals. Average consumption of meal types (breakfast, lunch, dinner) were assessed using life cycle assessment. Retail and consumer wastes, and weight losses and gains through cooking, were used to adjust the consumption quantities to production quantities. On average, meatless meals had more than a 40% reduction in environmental impacts than meat-containing meals for any of the assessed indicators (carbon footprint, water use, resource consumption, health impacts of pollution, and ecosystem quality). At maximum and minimum for carbon footprint, meat-containing dinners were associated with 5 kgCO2e and meatless lunches 1 kg CO2e. Results indicate that, on average in the US, meatless meals lessen environmental impacts in comparison to meat-containing meals; however, animal products (i.e., dairy) in meatless meals also had a substantial impact. Findings suggest that industrial interventions focusing on low-impact meat substitutes for dinners and thereafter lunches, and low-impact dairy substitutes for breakfasts, offer large opportunities for improving the environmental performance of the average diet.

Standardized Recipes and Their Influence on the Environmental Impact Assessment of Mixed Dishes: A Case Study on Pizza

“…The pizza type-specific estimates presented in this analysis are indicative of "extra meat" and "extra vegetable" pizzas impacts, with the latter generating a substantially lower carbon footprint. While this finding is in agreement with previous estimates for pizzas [37] and other mixed dishes [9,10,14,38,39], it should be noted that ingredient composition might vary greatly within pizza types that may considerably influence the impact of individual foods. This analysis also showed that the choice of the decomposition method has a noteworthy influence on the carbon footprint of individual foods and daily food intake.…”

Optimizing the Environmental Profile of Fresh-Cut Produce: Life Cycle Assessment of Novel Decontamination and Sanitation Techniques

“…We also considered the three endpoint indicators: damage to human health, damage to ecosystems, and damage to resource availability. The main strength of this methodology is that it ensures that the different impacts are not assessed more than once in different indicators, and thus ReCiPe scores are extensively used in the life cycle impact assessments [13,[58][59][60][61].…”

Integration of environment and nutrition in life cycle assessment of food Items: opportunities and challenges

“…A number of LCA studies have been published about meals, for example, university canteen meals (Cooreman-Algoed et al, 2020), low-carbon meals in public schools (Batlle-Bayer et al, 2021) and compiling existing LCA results into datasets that permit meal-based calculations for catering to dependent senior citizens (Saxe et al, 2019). It is also possible to use the meal as the function with an appropriate functional unit (Ernstoff et al, 2019a;García-Herrero, De Menna and Vittuari, 2019).…”