John Hartevelt writes in the Dominion Post about a new report debunking the belief that New Zealand’s exporting of lamb to Britain has a high carbon cost.
The research, hailed by Minister of Agriculture David Carter, suggests that the carbon produced by lamb production and transportation happens primarily on the farm: indeed, the carbon produced simply by Britons taking their lamb home from the supermarket is more than that produced shipping New Zealand lamb to Britain.
An excerpt: (read in full here)
“An AgResearch study into emissions from lamb production, made public yesterday, showed that each 100-gram portion of New Zealand lamb exported to Europe created the equivalent of 1.9kg of carbon dioxide.
“It found 80 per cent of that footprint was generated on the farm and only 5 per cent was in transportation to Britain.
“”The consumer travel from the butcher or supermarket stage … would have added another 7 per cent to the total footprint, and would have been greater than that for all other transportation stages including shipping from New Zealand to the United Kingdom,” the report’s lead author, Dr Stewart Ledgard, said.”