Vegetarian for a day

How hard would it be for everyone in the United States to go meatless for a day? Not that difficult, right? And it would be good for us—good for our health, and good for the environment. How good? Huffington Post writer Kathy Freston decided to mine the data to find out how environmentally beneficial just one vegetarian day per week would be over a year’s time. Here’s what she came up with:

The U.S. would save:

• 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost four months;

• 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the people of New Mexico for more than a year;

• 70 million gallons of gas;

• 3 million acres of land, an area twice the size of Delaware;

• 33 tons of antibiotics.

The U.S. would prevent:

• 3 million tons of soil erosion;

• Almost 7 million tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant;

• 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;

• Greenhouse-gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as is produced by France in a year.

Source: Huffington Post