Meat better for the environment than T-shirts
According to the University of Twente, you’re nicer to the environment if you eat meat than wear cotton T-shirts. A cotton T-shirt takes 2,700 liters of water, while some 100 g of meat takes 1,550 liters of water and a cup of coffee 140 liters. The Wereld Natuur Fonds (World Wide Fund for Nature) plans to use the calculations in awareness-raising campaigns. “Per capita, the Netherlands uses a whole lot of very thirsty crops,” says the WNF. A Dutch person uses 100 litres of water from the tap, which is just a fraction of the 3,300 litres of water used daily in the consumption of many imported foods.
Last Monday, party leader Marianne Thieme of the Partij voor de Dieren (Dutch Party for the Animals) presented the climate film ‘Meat the Truth’, where the message was that eating meat is bad for the environment. Not so, if we believe scientists instead of politicians.
Drinking coffee is bad too because you waste water in someone else’s country (the study calls this ‘invisible water use’) and that goes for cotton T-shirts as well.
(Link: vleesmagazine.nl)
[…] because I eat less meat’ blurb on a mailing list, I promptly responded with our posting on producing meat is actually less damaging to the environment than producing cotton T-shirts. I’ll bet you she still buys cotton […]
I eat 100g of meat perhaps six days a week. I buy a t-shirt maybe once or twice a year.
Eating 600g+ of meat a week is much worse for the environment than buying a t-shirt twice a year. In fact, it’s worse than buying a t-shirt every other day, and throwing away the one from two days ago.