Green - An environmentalist community

I'm more familiar with the climate effects related to meat consumption. I can't speak as much to the waste associated with the meat industry. I'm willing to bet there's a good amount of meat waste though, given that meat doesn't tend to last as long as other goods and since meat has more steps in production. As in you need to feed livestock, so you have the waste associated with growing feed for those animals, the water waste associated with hydrating them, and then also the meat waste itself. More steps would mean more waste in my mind. But that's speculation. I don't have any numbers. I don't think meat packaging is particularly more wasteful than the packaging used for most plant based foods, so I'm not sure about that. Can anybody else here speak to this?

There's a lot of wastefulness in animal agriculture that we don't see. For literal, physical waste, there is the problem of what to do with the huge amount of animal excrement. We generate far more than we could ever use as fertilizer, and much of what is leftover sits in "lagoons" and leeches into waterways. It's super eutrophying too, which means it kills off a lot of what's in rivers and leads to algae blooms.

Then in the non-physical category, it's a wasteful way to create calories because animals require so much input feed to create one calorie of meat or other product. Eating plants directly is more efficient.