Urban Consumption..Summary: Shaziya Ali, Jackie Cortez, Naseeba Ramjan, Jane Sun
Our group had a tough time coming up with a topic for this poster. We each were doing our papers on various subjects of beef. We wanted to find a way to combine a couple of our topics together and come up with a new study. We finally decided to combine Naseeba’s topic of methane gas from cattle contributing to global warming and Shaziya’s topic of socio-economic distribution of McDonalds across the city. What we wanted to find out was how does New York City’s consumption of beef at McDonalds contribute to our global warming crisis compared to other places.
Methane, like other greenhouse gases, directly interacts with the atmosphere by absorbing thermal infrared radiation from the earth, which warms the atmosphere, and by reflecting other wavelengths of radiation back at the earth. Methane also indirectly contributes to global warming by oxidizing into carbon dioxide, which does not break down as quickly as methane does.
Methane has the chemical formula CH4 compared to carbon dioxide’s CO2 . This composition gives methane a Global Warming Potential (GWP) of 56 over 20 years, and 21 over 100 years. Values decrease over time because of Methane’s short half-life. Carbon dioxide, in contrast, has a GWP of 1. Over the next fifty years, methane is expected to contribute from 15 to 17% of global warming.
Currently, cattle emissions from 1.3 billion domestic cattle account for 73% of the methane produced each year. McDonald’s, being the nation’s largest buyer of beef, contributes greatly to these emissions.
Since McDonald’s does not release official beef patty sales data, we asked the manager of a local McDonald’s restaurant how much beef they used daily. Using this data, we extrapolated the number of patties that one restaurant would use in a year, multiplied by the number of McDonald’s in Manhattan. We then estimated how many patties could be produced from one cow. We then calculated the lifetime methane emissions from those cows in order to find the total methane emissions one McDonald’s is responsible for producing.
To compare the average methane emissions from McDonald’s per square mile of Manhattan with the average emissions for the state of Wyoming, we divided the total number of McDonald’s by the total square mileage of each area, then multiplied that by the methane produced by each restaurant. The total number of restaurants in each area was sourced from Google Maps.
Our study has shown that for such a small area, NYC contributes a significant amount of methane emissions because of how much beef is consumed. Our data is restricted to beef consumption at McDonald’s, so in actuality, the amount of beef being consumed in the city is higher. Methane emissions account for about 20% of the greenhouse gases that are affecting our atmosphere. One ton of methane is equivalent to twenty-one tons of carbon dioxide. It is a good idea to reduce the amount of methane emissions because of this, but also because methane is easier to eliminate. It has a shorter half-life, 10 years compared to 100 years of carbon dioxide, and it has distinct and clear sources. The easiest way we can reduce methane emissions is by reducing our meat consumption, especially of beef. This will result in global cooling, and will protect our planet so that we may endure longer, healthier lives.
