Environmental costs of meat production: the case of typical EU pork production

This paper aims to address two questions: First, what is the real cost of meat to society if taking into account the environmental costs arising throughout the product life cycle; and second, whether and how the environmental costs related to meat production can be reduced. In addressing the issues, we use pig meat production in the EU as a case study. The environmental costs of meat are displayed first as characterized results at different midpoint categories e.g. global warming, nature occupation, acidification, eutrophication, ecotoxicity, etc., and then aggregated into a single score using conversion factors available from the Stepwise2006 method. Overall, the environmental costs of producing conventional pig meat are estimated to be 1.9 EUR per kg, which are of even larger size than the private costs of 1.4 EUR. In decreasing order of importance, nature occupation has been found to be the main contributor to the costs (55%), followed by global warming (21%) and respiratory inorganics (18%). A viable option combining improvement measures in three aspects: feed use, manure management, and manure utilization, reduces the environmental costs by a factor of 1.4. This results in an equal size of the environmental costs and the private costs. ► The environmental costs of pig meat are estimated using the Stepwise2006 method. ► The costs are of even larger size than the private costs, as per the estimate. ► Implementation of improvement measures helps reduce the costs by a factor of 1.4. ► The three improvement areas are: feed use, manure management and manure utilization.