The Concealed Ecological Cost of Intensively-Processed Products: How the Industry Should Pay

If you examine a package of M&M's, among the best-selling candies in the United States, you'll notice recognizable ingredients like sweetener, skimmed milk powder, and cocoa butter. However, many more elements are less known: acacia gum, dextrin, carnauba wax, soya lecithin, and E100.

There are 34 components in M&Ms, and at least 30 countries involved in supplying them. Every one has its own supply chain that transforms base substances into ingredients – cocoa into cocoa liquor, cane into sugar, oil into artificial coloring.

These ingredients then journey across the world to a main manufacturing plant where they are mixed and converted into tiny blue, red, yellow and green chocolate gems.

It's becoming more widely recognized that agricultural networks are a significant contributor of the climate crisis. Scientists can study land clearing for farming or methane emissions from livestock. Yet the ecological footprint of ultra-processed foods – like M&Ms – is more ambiguous and is just beginning to be understood. A key factor they have been challenging to assess is the inherent complexity of UPFs: these industrially made foods include a huge number of components and processes to assemble them, making it extremely difficult to monitor.

But it doesn't mean it's unimportant. Since UPFs dominate US grocery store shelves and diets – they now comprise seventy percent of products purchased in grocery stores, and over 50% of calories consumed – specialists say that understanding their environmental toll is critical to build a more climate-friendly agricultural system.

What We Already Understand

While scientists are just beginning to investigate the ecological effects of ultra-processed foods, what's already known about them is worrisome.

"The greater the processing products become, the more deleterious they are to public wellness and the planet," said a senior researcher. The main reason, he explains, is that the ingredients are so energy intensive. Once assembled, the toll balloons.

Consider the popular candy. The first step in producing the candies is farming for chocolate beans, sweetener, dairy and palm.

It has been extensive evidence that farming for components like cocoa drives consistently rising rates of deforestation worldwide. Since 1850, farmland growth has driven nearly ninety percent of worldwide forest loss, which has been responsible for thirty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Major companies have been called out in the past for farming practices in their supply chain, and have since created sustainability plans, but these do not resolve that large-scale agricultural practices are, at their core, ecologically damaging.

Then there's, sweetener, dried dairy and palm fat – likewise major carbon dioxide sources.

Furthermore are the industrially made ingredients like artificial colors – perhaps the signature of intensive manufacturing – which these candies contain 13 different types of. Blue M&Ms are colored with E132 and E133; these colorants are primarily produced in food dye manufacturing hotspots Asia, through synthetic processes of aromatic hydrocarbons with chemical compounds, catalyzed by the elements copper and chromium.

Producing soy lecithin, an additive made from soybean oil that's used to change the consistency of candy, requires procedures like degumming in a hot reactor, extracting phospholipids, bleaching using chemical agents and drying under vacuum pressure. Similarly, a sweetener, begins as corn that gets soaked in chemicals before being ground, divided and dehydrated. From there, it's broken down into simpler compounds using biological catalysts and acids, and then recrystallized.

Although ultra-processed chocolate products are among the most damaging, different types of ultra-processed foods are taxing on the planet as well. Take for instance a well-known chip, which has 39 components. Maize is the main ingredient, and for every acre grown, one thousand kilograms of CO2 is released to the atmosphere. Similar to major brands, manufacturers have created their own sustainability promises, but many of these commitments are underpinned by practices that are considered greenwashing.

As a result, some experts have begun estimating the ecological cost of ultra-processed foods.

A study estimated that well-known sweets generate at least thirteen point two kilograms of greenhouse gases per kilo produced. Considering yearly output of more than six hundred million kilograms in the United States, this would mean that the candies emit at least three point eight million tonnes of CO2 – accounting for 0.1% of yearly carbon output in the US. But, this is just a calculation based on publicly available data; the actual impact is probably much higher, according to specialists.

There's a "unknown element" when it comes to emissions tracking in the manufactured food sector, says Patrick Callery who researches how corporations respond to the climate crisis. "There exists so much ambiguity as supply chains get complex."

What We Don't Know

Calculating precisely of the ecological impact of ultra-processed foods is nearly impossible, given that, by definition, these products consist of many ingredients and a high volume of opaque processes. Components aren't just combined like one would do to make a stew at home. Instead, these elements are altered synthetically, certain portions removed, and flavors, colors or consistencies incorporated – and it's unknown what the impact of these methods are because numerous providers and parts are involved.

A further factor is that all UPFs are the creations of manufacturing corporations that have minimal motivation to reveal their ecological impact and may not fully understand it to start with.

As an example, major brands do not farm key ingredients themselves, but instead rely on numerous growers that don't always have accurate carbon accounting measures in place. This means that emissions from big food corporations may be underreported. Experts said that corporations "lack actual data, so they use estimated values, which are guesses."

Specialists say that corporations submit data on simple things like transportation, which are simpler to measure, and frequently exclude or convolute the farming-related carbon of their items. Ultimately, disclosing significant carbon output contradicts the interests of large food corporations, so the complex calculations needed to establish the carbon footprint of industrial farming and complex manufacturing methods used to make processed food components remain un-researched.

"The main point of manufactured products is money," stated the researcher, noting that they're designed to be appealing, easy and pleasurable to eat.

"Most of the people in the manufacturing sector's production network are not concerned with climate change from an ideological point of view, but they do care about money," said a specialist. He explains that to change these motivations, the value of products and components would need to include their effect on our shared climate. But that would require government regulations and economic consequences based on the true environmental cost of ultra-processed foods.

Why It Is Important

At just under $2, the cost of popular candies at the supermarket barely represents their true cost on the planet. But to tackle these problems with manufactured products, more than just a minor adjustments to the ingredient list are needed.

"Reducing the sodium, or sweetener of just a single item is just superficial eco-marketing," stated Fardet. "It is necessary to transform the entire system." To do that, he recommended eating more regionally produced, whole foods, which often take much less energy and transportation to create, and therefore have a much smaller carbon footprint.

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