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It costs less in CO2 costs to ship a leg of lamb from New Zealand to a supermarket in Los Angeles than it does for you to get in a car and bring that lamb home

It costs less in CO2 costs to ship a leg of lamb from New Zealand to a supermarket in Los Angeles than it does for you to get in a car and bring that lamb home with you. It also costs less in CO2 costs to ship that lamb from NZ to a supermarket than to truck it in from a local farm to your fancy organic farmer's market. If you want to attack CO2 costs, the primary costs are in the last mile.

mulmen 8y ago
Do you have any data to back this up? How does the NZ lamb get to the airport? And how does it get from the airport to the grocery store?
- markdown 8y ago
  Meat (aside from fresh fish) is rarely flown.
  - mulmen 8y ago
    That’s not really the point. Unless you go grocery shopping at the (air)port something else brings the goods to your store.
- mdorazio 8y ago
  I think the parent comment is referencing the huge economies of scale you get on shipping things in bulk with respect to CO2 emissions. If you have 1,000 legs of lamb in a shipping container, the per-leg CO2 cost is low in comparison to one leg of lamb in a car, even if the distances are very different. A heavy truck gets maybe 6mpg compared to your car getting 25, but if the truck is carrying 1000x more items, the truck would have to go ~250 times farther to break even. I'm not sure how it breaks out for air cargo (probably not great), but ocean and rail are both more efficient than trucks.
  - flukus 8y ago
    The problem is that's only amortizing on side of the equation. If you were to pick up that leg of lamb and a dozen other things on the way home from work then the additional CO2 cost from the lamb itself is negligible. It's like saying cars produce less emissions than bikes by including the manufacturing costs of the bike but not the car.
    - mdorazio 8y ago
      Sure, it also depends what kind of car you're driving, how much traffic there is, how far you are from the grocery store, etc. etc. The original parent point I was trying to clarify is that transportation impact on the environment for most food products is low on the list of things we should be worrying about.
  - mulmen 8y ago
    > It also costs less in CO2 costs to ship that lamb from NZ to a supermarket than to truck it in from a local farm to your fancy organic farmer's market. How does the lamb get from the port to the grocery store? Is the port not roughly equidistant from the point of sale as the local farm? How is the “fancy organic farmers market” less efficient to ship to in the last mile before the point of sale?
    - roel_v 8y ago
      Well that all depends on the exact numbers, doesn't it? But someone going to the farmers market twice as often as they'd need to go to the supermarket (because that produce doesn't last as long, although that mostly because of less efficient processing methods in small farms) is already almost surely polluting more than the person going to the supermarket. That's not even mentioning the savings that can be had from home delivery. Although I had a local organic pig farmer deliver meat at home just yesterday, so that's not an advantage exclusive to large players (provided he has enough customers to do multiple drops on one tour - I should've asked him, come to think of it).
      - deleted 8y ago
clay_the_ripper 8y ago
While I could believe that this is true, I would love to see some evidence to back up this claim. You would also need to account for the entirety of emissions, including, as a previous commenter said, other emissions involved in the supply chain.
- conception 8y ago
  It's not true sadly. http://www.worldshipping.org/industry-issues/environment/air-emissions/carbon-emissions http://www.worldshipping.org/industry-issues/environment/air... If you go with a to of lamb for simplicity thats 10g/km. It's about 10km so 100,000g. The truck is like, let's go on the high end 100g/km and what, 100km? That's still only 10kg of co2. Unless of course I'm missing something.
  - extrapickles 8y ago
    The chart assumes you are moving 1 ton of material, so its 20kg of co2 to ship 1 ton of lamb 100km.
- roel_v 8y ago
  The answer is, as usual, 'it depends'. There are journals full of people modeling things like this. What is sure though, is that the claim 'local is always better' is not true. But it's easy to attack absolutes because they're almost always wrong.
xg15 8y ago
So: CO2 for meat from NZ: Shipping + last mile CO2 for locally produced meat: last mile How is meat from NZ producing less CO2 than locally produced?
- jcranmer 8y ago
  You're using one (18-wheeler) truck for all of the different kinds of food for the last mile in terms of distribution center-to-supermarket, but one (pickup) truck each for the different sources for the farm-to-farmer's market. Not to mention that the distribution center is likely closer than the farms.
  - xg15 8y ago
    But food doesn't grow in distribution centers. At some point you have to transport the food out of the farm. That would result in the following chains (simplified): Local: Farm -(1)-> Farmer's market -(4)-> Consumer's home National: Farm -(1)-> Distribution center -(3)-> Supermarket -(4)-> Consumer's home International: Farm -(1)-> Harbor/Distribution center of producing country -(2)-> Harbor/Distribution center of consuming country -(3)-> Supermarket -(4)-> Consumer's home Where (1) is the farmer's pickup truck, (2) is a massive high-seas-capable container vessel, (3) is the 18-wheeler and (4) is the consumer's audi. Yes, (2) and (3) may be vastly more efficient in CO2 per transported item - but it doesn't change the fact that they happen in addition to (1) and (4).
    - saalweachter 8y ago
      I would note it's frequently an 18-wheeler from the farm to a distribution center as well.
    - jcranmer 8y ago
      That's not the case. When you talk about large-scale farming, the (1) in the latter chains are actually (3).
stevesimmons 8y ago
> If you want to attack CO2 costs, the primary costs are in the last mile. If you want to attack CO2 costs, 90% of lamb's CO2 production occurs on the farm. Only 10% is from processing, distribution, retail, cooking, and waste disposal [1]. Let's charitably assume 1/3 of the post-farm CO2 emissions are from distribution and half of those could be saved by producing closer to the point of consumption. So farm production only needs to be 1.8% (=(10/3/2)/90) more efficient in NZ for it to be net beneficial. Presumably NZ is particularly efficient for lamb, otherwise it wouldn't be such a major export. [1] To pick one reasonably creditble data source, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production#cite_note-meat_eaters_guide-56 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p... which ends with this graph: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/webcitation/419e58a77a34f10d258e827ef20e23c991d33480 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/webcitation/419e58a77a34f...

mulmen 8y ago

Do you have any data to back this up? How does the NZ lamb get to the airport? And how does it get from the airport to the grocery store?

markdown 8y ago
Meat (aside from fresh fish) is rarely flown.
- mulmen 8y ago
  That’s not really the point. Unless you go grocery shopping at the (air)port something else brings the goods to your store.
mdorazio 8y ago
I think the parent comment is referencing the huge economies of scale you get on shipping things in bulk with respect to CO2 emissions. If you have 1,000 legs of lamb in a shipping container, the per-leg CO2 cost is low in comparison to one leg of lamb in a car, even if the distances are very different. A heavy truck gets maybe 6mpg compared to your car getting 25, but if the truck is carrying 1000x more items, the truck would have to go ~250 times farther to break even. I'm not sure how it breaks out for air cargo (probably not great), but ocean and rail are both more efficient than trucks.
- flukus 8y ago
  The problem is that's only amortizing on side of the equation. If you were to pick up that leg of lamb and a dozen other things on the way home from work then the additional CO2 cost from the lamb itself is negligible. It's like saying cars produce less emissions than bikes by including the manufacturing costs of the bike but not the car.
  - mdorazio 8y ago
    Sure, it also depends what kind of car you're driving, how much traffic there is, how far you are from the grocery store, etc. etc. The original parent point I was trying to clarify is that transportation impact on the environment for most food products is low on the list of things we should be worrying about.
- mulmen 8y ago
  > It also costs less in CO2 costs to ship that lamb from NZ to a supermarket than to truck it in from a local farm to your fancy organic farmer's market. How does the lamb get from the port to the grocery store? Is the port not roughly equidistant from the point of sale as the local farm? How is the “fancy organic farmers market” less efficient to ship to in the last mile before the point of sale?
  - roel_v 8y ago
    Well that all depends on the exact numbers, doesn't it? But someone going to the farmers market twice as often as they'd need to go to the supermarket (because that produce doesn't last as long, although that mostly because of less efficient processing methods in small farms) is already almost surely polluting more than the person going to the supermarket. That's not even mentioning the savings that can be had from home delivery. Although I had a local organic pig farmer deliver meat at home just yesterday, so that's not an advantage exclusive to large players (provided he has enough customers to do multiple drops on one tour - I should've asked him, come to think of it).
    - deleted 8y ago

clay_the_ripper 8y ago

While I could believe that this is true, I would love to see some evidence to back up this claim. You would also need to account for the entirety of emissions, including, as a previous commenter said, other emissions involved in the supply chain.

conception 8y ago
It's not true sadly. http://www.worldshipping.org/industry-issues/environment/air-emissions/carbon-emissions http://www.worldshipping.org/industry-issues/environment/air... If you go with a to of lamb for simplicity thats 10g/km. It's about 10km so 100,000g. The truck is like, let's go on the high end 100g/km and what, 100km? That's still only 10kg of co2. Unless of course I'm missing something.
- extrapickles 8y ago
  The chart assumes you are moving 1 ton of material, so its 20kg of co2 to ship 1 ton of lamb 100km.
roel_v 8y ago
The answer is, as usual, 'it depends'. There are journals full of people modeling things like this. What is sure though, is that the claim 'local is always better' is not true. But it's easy to attack absolutes because they're almost always wrong.

xg15 8y ago

So: CO2 for meat from NZ: Shipping + last mile CO2 for locally produced meat: last mile How is meat from NZ producing less CO2 than locally produced?

jcranmer 8y ago
You're using one (18-wheeler) truck for all of the different kinds of food for the last mile in terms of distribution center-to-supermarket, but one (pickup) truck each for the different sources for the farm-to-farmer's market. Not to mention that the distribution center is likely closer than the farms.
- xg15 8y ago
  But food doesn't grow in distribution centers. At some point you have to transport the food out of the farm. That would result in the following chains (simplified): Local: Farm -(1)-> Farmer's market -(4)-> Consumer's home National: Farm -(1)-> Distribution center -(3)-> Supermarket -(4)-> Consumer's home International: Farm -(1)-> Harbor/Distribution center of producing country -(2)-> Harbor/Distribution center of consuming country -(3)-> Supermarket -(4)-> Consumer's home Where (1) is the farmer's pickup truck, (2) is a massive high-seas-capable container vessel, (3) is the 18-wheeler and (4) is the consumer's audi. Yes, (2) and (3) may be vastly more efficient in CO2 per transported item - but it doesn't change the fact that they happen in addition to (1) and (4).
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    I would note it's frequently an 18-wheeler from the farm to a distribution center as well.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    That's not the case. When you talk about large-scale farming, the (1) in the latter chains are actually (3).

stevesimmons 8y ago

> If you want to attack CO2 costs, the primary costs are in the last mile. If you want to attack CO2 costs, 90% of lamb's CO2 production occurs on the farm. Only 10% is from processing, distribution, retail, cooking, and waste disposal [1]. Let's charitably assume 1/3 of the post-farm CO2 emissions are from distribution and half of those could be saved by producing closer to the point of consumption. So farm production only needs to be 1.8% (=(10/3/2)/90) more efficient in NZ for it to be net beneficial. Presumably NZ is particularly efficient for lamb, otherwise it wouldn't be such a major export. [1] To pick one reasonably creditble data source, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production#cite_note-meat_eaters_guide-56 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p... which ends with this graph: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/webcitation/419e58a77a34f10d258e827ef20e23c991d33480 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/webcitation/419e58a77a34f...