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NEW YEAR, NEW WAYS TO HELP OUR PLANET

Photo credit: Canva Stock Image

It’s the start of a brand new year, and with it comes an abundance of new opportunities for helping animals and the planet.  We’re kicking off 2022 by compiling a list of four simple ways you can drastically reduce your carbon footprint, while still helping animals:

  1. Reduce your animal product consumption. Did you know that more than 88 billion animals are raised for food every year?  According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, animal agriculture practices emit up to 90 million tonnes of C02 into the atmosphere annually, through the unsustainable burning of fossil fuels. This is needed to supply enough feed, water, power and machinery to house and raise the vastly growing number of farmed animals across the globe.  Animal agriculture is also one of the major consumers of natural resources.  For instance, it takes more than 15,000 litres of water to produce 1 kg of beef, whereas only 800 litres of water is needed to produce 1 kg of apples.
  2. Reduce your seafood consumption. It is estimated that roughly 2 trillion fish and marine animals are caught and killed globally every single year.  More shocking however, is that lethal bycatch in fishing nets (dolphins, turtles, non-target fish, etc) accounts for 40% of all animals killed by the global fishing industry. Discarded fishing nets also account for 640,000 tonnes of residual garbage in our oceans every single year, making the global seafood industry one of the most harmful and unsustainable industries on the planet.
  3. Reduce your plastic intake. We now know that many plastics can take hundreds to thousands of years to disintegrate. By reducing how much plastic we are buying and throwing away, we can preserve vital ecosystems, and protect wild animals from the dangers of plastic waste.
  4. Explore zero-waste living. A key component of a zero-waste lifestyle is to only use what you need, and to upcycle, recycle and reuse items as much as possible, thus greatly reducing the amount of waste we continuously add to the environment.

Though there are many factors contributing to climate change around the globe, incorporating small changes into our daily lives can have a great impact. Together, we can reduce climate change, and create a kinder, healthier planet world for both ourselves and our animal friends.