# The carbon print of a hamburger



## ScrambleEggHead (Dec 9, 2010)

I saw a program recently which talked of this. It's really unfathomable (for me anyway).

The Cheeseburger Footprint

I excerpted the most pertinent data (IMO) here.  

 A typical beef cow produces approximately 500 lbs of meat  for boneless steaks and ground beef. If we assume that the typical  burger is a quarter-pound of pre-cooked meat, that's 2,000 burgers per  cow. Dividing the methane total by the number of burgers, then, we get  about 2.6 CO2-equivalent kilograms of additional greenhouse gas  emissions from methane, per burger, or roughly as much greenhouse gas  produced from cow burps (etc.) as from all of the energy used to raise,  feed or produce all of the components of a completed cheeseburger! 
 That's a total of 3.6-6.1 kg of CO2-equivalent per burger. If we accept  the ~3/week number, that's 540-915 kg of greenhouse gas per year for an  average American's burger consumption. And for the nation as a whole? 
300,000,000	citizens
* 150 		burgers/year
* 4.35 		kilograms of CO2-equivalent per burger
/ 1000		kilograms per metric ton
= 195,750,000	annual metric tons of CO2-equivalent for all US burgers
That's at a lower-than-average level of kg/burger.   Even with the lower claim of one cheeseburger per week, for an average American, the numbers remain sobering. 
300,000,000	citizens
* 50		burgers/year (~Fast Food Nation)
* 4.35		kilograms of CO2-equivalent per burger
/ 1000		kilograms per metric ton
= 65,250,000	annual metric tons of CO2-equivalent for all US burgers
Those numbers are big, impressive, and probably meaningless.  So let's convert that to something more visceral. Let's compare to the output from a more familiar item: an SUV. 
A Hummer H3 SUV emits 11.1 tons (imp.) of CO2 over a year; this converts to about 10.1 metric tons, so we'll call it 10 to make the math easy.  
195,750,000	annual metric tons of CO2-equivalent for all US burgers
/10		metric tons of CO2-equivalent per SUV  =19.6 million SUVs  ​


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## Dozmonic (Dec 9, 2010)

3 burgers per person per week? Wow!

Interesting post ;-)


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## chrispenycate (Dec 9, 2010)

Ah, but what you haven't factored into the "methane to CO2 equivalence" is how long they each hang around.

Methane reacts with oxygen, (giving water and CO2, admittedly) so doesn't hang around all that long, while CO2 lasts until it's either a) incorporated into a plant, b) absorbed by a limestone mountain (or concrete), or dissolves in the ocean; lot longer. 

Besides, that argument means that the slaughter of the great bison herds on the American plains was a moral and ecological act, as they produce every bit as much methane as their domesticated bovine cousins. And the wildebeest charging over the savannah aren't much better; should be eliminated. And elephants, of course, and drain all the swamps…


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## Dave (Dec 9, 2010)

Chris is spot on, just kill all the animals and buy more SUVs. Problem solved. Will this be Sarah Palin's party platform (political manifesto)?


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