— Written by Camryn Kirk

Gobble Gobble 🍽️

Americans eat more than 46 million turkeys on Thanksgiving each year. That means, each American eats around 3 pounds of turkey, which is a mind-boggling amount. Maybe we all feel like we gained a few pounds the day after Thanksgiving because we actually ate a few? (Let’s be honest it’s much more than a few when you count pie.)

The average Thanksgiving turkey can emit about 6.6 pounds of CO2 per pound. Electric ovens also emit energy, running one for four hours emits approximately 3.5 pounds of CO2. Let’s do some quick math… an additional 2,369,000 tons of CO2 are emitted just to raise and roast all those Thanksgiving birds.

What About a Veggie Thanksgiving? 🍠🥕🥦

We all know that’s great idea to make Thanksgiving more sustainable. But if you can’t do that or just can’t risk a family feud over the menu, you can instead opt for all vegetarian sides such as veggie stuffing, salads, roasted vegetables, etc. Using vegetables in season makes your meal even more eco-friendly and delicious. Some veggies in season during Thanksgiving are winter squash, brussels sprouts, broccoli, carrots, sweet potatoes, celery, cabbage, and more. 

Other tips our team has collected:

• Select a turkey or ingredients from a regenerative farm

• Cut down your dairy intake

• Cut out other meat intake during Thanksgiving

• Cook everything all at once so you don’t have your oven running longer than necessary

• Defrost your food overnight before Thanksgiving day so you don’t have to use energy to defrost them faster

• Save money, time, and emissions by right-sizing your food preparations to fit your gathering, or make sure all your leftovers get eaten or composted

Things Could Always Be Worse.

If Americans' Thanksgiving celebration was eating roast beef, we would be emitting way more CO2. How much you might ask? Producing 1 pound of beef emits between 14 and 30 pounds of CO2. If we wanted to take the median value and say it is 22 pounds of CO2 emitted per pound of beef, the total CO2 emitted from beef could be 3 times the total CO2 emitted for a turkey dinner. This would be over 7 million tons of CO2 emitted. So yes, things could always be worse. Regardless, it’s a good idea to opt for a veggie-friendly Thanksgiving this year, would you ever do a turkey-less Thanksgiving?

Climate Solutions for Your Plate👏

While the climate impacts of meat are often discussed, agriculture at large is responsible for a quarter of global emissions. Conventional fertilizer production alone is responsible for 2% of total global emissions. The team at Nitricity is revolutionizing the industry with a game-changing technology that creates clean fertilizer using only air, water, renewable energy, and almond shells. This could help transform our Thanksgiving plates, and our plates for every other day of the year.

Watch our latest Reinventing Tomorrow Episode to learn more about how Nitricity is changing the fertilizer game here. The grass isn’t always greener with conventional fertilizer! 🦗

👀 Some Good News Stories You Might Have Missed This Week 🗞️📺:

1. Greening Concrete: A Major Emitter Inches Toward Carbon Neutrality | Christian Schwägerl 🏗️ 🚧

2. ‘A Message of Hope’: 6 European Countries Pledge €130 Million to Protect Biodiversity | Euronews Green 🌱🐟

3. Biden Administration Races to Shell out Billions for Clean Energy as Election Nears | Jennifer McDermott and Matthew Daly ☀️🔋

Want to learn more about how your food consumption impacts the planet? Drop a reply and let us know! 💬