TL;DR:
A southwest Missouri river already contaminated with E. coli could soon receive up to 350,000 gallons of wastewater daily from a meatpacking facility.
And this as we’re seeing stories from other areas about massive die-offs due to eutrophication. Animal waste is hugely eutrophying to waterways, and this is well-documented. We just never learn.
Stop eating meat, folks. Under current circumstances, the planet just can’t take it.
I should stop eating meat because legislators are corrupt? That’s an interesting thought process you have there. I’m sure your biases had no impact on your totally logical conclusion. /s
Environmental problems are more inherent to meat production than that. The best-case production of animal products comes out worse than the worst case production of plants for human consumption
Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits
[…]
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
@GrumbleGrim @inasaba you should stop eating meat because it lowers your carbon footprint. Simple.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If the meatpacking facility is treating it’s water appropriately and the water quality is getting regularly tested as I imagine it would be then it’s entirely possible that the meat packing plant could actually improve the quality of the water. Whether or not that will actually happen is another matter, but it’s not cause for immediate doomerism.
