Reefer Madness: The Footprint of Refrigerated Food
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 07.23.08
We often talk about the benefits of local, fresh food, but here is another we have not thought about before: the footprint of refrigeration. So many processed foods move from reefer trailer to refrigerated case in the store to the freezer in your house, what does that use in energy?
Over at the Ethicurian, Marc crunched the numbers and found that the entire food industry uses 1.02.1016 BTUs of energy per year, the equivalent of 1,760,000 barrels of oil. Refrigeration uses up 14.9% of that (the hatched part of the graph above) or 262,000 barrels of oil, or 464,546, MWhr.
Of course, shopping for fresh food and using it right away won't get rid of all refrigeration; we will always have ice cream and milk. But it certainly would make a difference. ::Ethicurian for backup and sources
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Interesting that TH targets processed food, much of which does not require refrigeration, whereas fresh meat, poultry, dairy and produce do. A box of Mac-n-Cheese ought to last a good four years of college, but chicken eggs and broccoli ... about a week. So off to the store in my SUV for more milk and organic soy cheese, the truck just arrived! (not!)
Is this for the whole world, for the US, or what?
According to the numbers given in the article, the food industry uses a total of less than 400 MW of energy. That seems very low to me.
This is another example of going after the high-hanging fruit instead of the low-hanging fruit.
Treehugger, and most of us, should be concerned first with where the highest marginal returns can be had. If Anthony's numbers are right (they seem pretty close), then this is a relatively small contributor (at most.)
Energy consumption, in and of itself, isn't necessarily bad. The energy used in the healthcare industry, for example, is necessary energy used in most cases. Can it be made more efficient? Yes. But is it really worth going after FIRST? No.
Time and money spent on extolling the "evils" of refrigeration could be better spent on subsidizing CFLs or construction of more wind power. I believe strongly in the idea that we should knock down the easiest problems first-- that's where gains are had quickly and easily.
This is not one of them.
I see, this was just a typo.
1 barrel of oil is about 5.8 million BTUs.
1.02.1016 divided by 5.8m is 1.76 billion barrels of oil per year.
That's about 4.8m barrels of oil equivalent per year. This is about a quarter of our oil usage, but the food industry derives its energy usage from a combination of oil, natural gas, and electricity (coal, nuclear, etc.), so actual oil consumption by the ag industry is less than that.
A while back I did the math: refrigerated soda machines consume 9,000 gigawatts of electricity a year – just in case you need that 35F Diet Coke at 3am in the morning. More math and the original post here – http://mccamon.org/2007/08/the-other-guilty-pleasure/