#12906990, By mrharvest Post Poll... Britain decided to...

mrharvest 24 May 2021 11:39:15 5,718 posts
Seen 2 weeks ago
Registered 18 years ago

Technoishmatt wrote:
You'd be surprised. E.g It is lower carbon to eat NZ lamb than local lamb. Stuff shipped by container ship is pretty low carbon I believe.

Hmm. I had to do some checking on this. The quickest results I found are:
"1 tonne of freight transported 1 km by a modern ship emits around 25 g of CO2" (from https://tree-nation.com/projects/inside-tree-nation/article/6884-the-carbon-emissions-of-a-packageparcel. They also quote a second figure "As calculated by Time for Change (2011), one tonne of freight transported 1km by a modern ship emits between 10 to 40g of CO2" so even if this is a greenie-leftie site it's within the bracket.)

Then looking at this: https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane
Gives 14kg CO2 plus additional 26kg equivalent from methane for a kilo of lamb.

Freight distance from New Zealand to UK is 14536 nautical miles (from: http://ports.com/sea-route/port-of-auckland,new-zealand/london-thamesport,united-kingdom/) so 26920 kilometres.

1 kilo of meat from New Zealand would therefore add 673g of carbon emissions, just barely over half a kilo. Yeah, I reckon if New Zealand has somehow more efficient lamb farming then it'll be better. Interesting result (I was expecting that this wouldn't be the case)!