It continues to amaze me how easily marketers pervert basic science. For example, CattleNetwork claims:

“Bottom line: Instead of banning factory farms and the efficiencies those large-scale operations bring to the world’s dinner table, we need to find ways to become even more efficient in order to adequately feed our planet’s growing population.”

Trouble is, meat is inherently inefficient.

Growing corn and soy and feeding that to animals and then eating those animals is wasteful.

A less wasteful alternative is to eat the corn and soy directly, rather than filter the protein and other nutrients through the flesh of sentient beings.

Related resources to learn more:

• Wikipedia article on Trophic Levels
• Wikipedia article on Meat Production’s Environmental Effects

“From start to finish the amount of energy to create a leather hide is 20 times greater than that to produce a synthetic material. The production of leather requires: transport of feed to animals, removal of waste from animals, electricity in housing facility, electricity for other operations and killing in facility, pesticide use, vaccine and antibiotic use, transport to remove carcasses, transport of pelts; then to a tannery which involves sorting, soaking, fleshing, tanning, wringing, drying, kicking, cleaning, trimming, buffing, drying, finishing; then transport to the garment maker, then a wholesaler, and so on”

You can read the whole article at GGA, or go directly to the article’s sources:

1-Leather and the environment – Article from E/ The Environmental Magazine http://www.healthnewsdigest.com/news/Environment_380/Leather_and_the_Environment.shtml

2-UN Report “Livestock’s Long Shadow” 2006-http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM

3-Doris Schubert, “Assessment of the Environmental Release of Chemicals From the Leather Processing Industry,” IC-07 Leather Processing Industry 28 Jul. 1998.

4- Adventures in the Skin Trade, Forbes.com http://www.forbes.com/business/forbes/2007/1126/142.html

5-United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Regis Tannery,” Waste Site Cleanup and Reuse in New England 9 Aug. 2006.