D22-024

'Veganism is the single biggest way to reduce our environmental impact'. In 2020 an oxford study found that becoming vegan can reduce an individual's carbon footprint from food by up to 73 percent. Our proposal involves encouraging people to make the change towards plant-based eating. Here are some reasons why: As a group of non-vegans, with some of us consuming more animal products than others, we are not perfect examples of how to make carbon conscious eating choices to combat climate change. However, we do believe that with the correct information and education we and other people would be more likely to change their eating habits. With a similar initiative to the traffic-light labelling on pre-packaged food items, showing the nutritional information of the product and using a colour-coded system to make it easier for customers to judge the nutritional content of their food, we have designed a way to also rate food on its environmental impact. Using calculated greenhouse emissions for the products, colour coded with red for very polluting and green for less polluting, we would make it compulsory for food manufacturers to include this figure on their labels in a hope to encourage people to make more environmentally conscientious choices.

We believe that unless people have numbers presented to them, enabling direct comparison and an informed choice to be made, the significantly higher environmental impact of animal products will never be realised. We considered using an app or educational resource to allow people to check the carbon footprint of the products they are buying, however, decided that this may not be as accessible or convenient as labelling the packaging.