The Carbon Cost of Christmas

What happens when 60 million people sit down to Christmas Dinner? Is there someone around to measure their collective carbon footprint? The answer is YES.

Researchers from the UK have calculated that the carbon footprint of all the Christmas dinners eaten in the UK in 2007 will be the same as driving around the world 6000 times!

Now multiply this number by 5 to get the carbon footprint for America. With a population of 301 million, the footprint is the same as driving around the world 30,000 times!

Here’s how academics from the School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science at Manchester University did their analysis.

A traditional Christmas feast includes roast turkey with stuffing, roast potatoes and vegetables, cranberry sauce and other trimmings. Drinks were excluded. The results: one meal for eight generates the equivalent of 20 kg of carbon dioxide emissions. If only one third of the UK population eats the traditional meal, the impact is a massive 51,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Food production and processing are responsible for three quarters of the total carbon footprint.

According to project leader Professor Adisa Azapagic: turkeys are the main culprit, then cranberries. All the turkeys eaten in the UK at Christmas will have gobbled down some 12,000 tons of wheat, 3,000 tons of barley, 4,000 tons of rape seeds and 800 tons of fish meal.

The worst offender in the UK is the humble cranberry. Whether by air or by sea, cranberries must travel across the ocean from their point of origin in the United States. Most countries don’t yet calculate carbon dioxide emissions from marine and air transport.