In 2015, MorningStar Farms® worked with Quantis, leaders in life cycle assessment consulting, to conduct a study comparing the environmental impact of veggie meals, meat-containing meals, and some of our own products across water use, greenhouse gas emission and land use. In 2020, a Veg Effect Calculator™ was created specifically for kids, so they can see the good their veggie meal can create.

Choose the number of meals with meat you'd swap for veggie meals each week.
Breakfasts
Lunches
Dinners
Now, imagine what could happen if more students made this swap for the school year. What a difference we could make!
Students
Weeks
See your results
If they ate this way for 28 weeks per year, they could make this amazingly Earth-friendly environmental impact*:
4K
gallons of water saved
117
car miles of greenhouse gas emissions saved
1K
SQUARE FEET OF LAND saved
That's 27 times the amount of water the average American uses in a day. Gulp!
Oh dear. If that many people chose veggies that often, it would literally change agriculture as we know it, so we can’t calculate what the impact would be. But hey, way to be optimistic!
TRY ANOTHER COMBO!

*The actual environmental impacts will vary depending on various factors, including the source of the food and other overall dietary choices. Click here for lifecycle assessment and see below for comparison facts.

Thousands are represented in K, millions are represented in M, billions are represented in B and trillions are represented in T.

COMPARISON FACTS

Choosing veggie meals over meals with meat can result in some big time resource savings. To make those savings more relatable, we’ve equated them to things you might recognize, like a parking space, or Niagara Falls or the moon. To find out how we define these comparisons, see the links below.

VOLUME COMPARISONS IN GALLONS

Shower

The EPA defines an average American shower as 8 minutes long using 18 gallons of water.
https://www3.epa.gov/watersense/docs/ws_shower_better_learning_resource_508.pdf

Load of Laundry

The U.S. Geological Survey claims most newer washing machines require around 25 gallons of water per load.
http://water.usgs.gov/edu/qa-home-percapita.html

Daily Water Use (individual)

The Blue Planet Network cites US water consumption at 176 gallons a day.
http://www.mltmua.com/conservation/your-respect.pdf

Lap Pool

SwimEx estimates traditional single lane lap pool volume at 8,900 to 10,000 gallons, or 9,450 gallons.
http://www.swimex.com/lap-swimming-pools-vs-swimex-swim-in-place-pools/

Capitol Rotunda

Capitol.gov lists the volume of the Rotunda at 1.3 million cubic feet, or 9.7 million gallons.
https://www.aoc.gov/facts/capitol-hill

Niagara Falls

The American side of Niagara Falls dumps 150,000 gallons a second, or 540 million gallons an hour.
http://www.niagarafallslive.com/Facts_about_Niagara_Falls.htm

DISTANCE COMPARISONS IN MILES

ISS

Via a chart describing the mean orbital distance of the International Space Station over the last year, we found that the average ISS orbit distance to be 249 miles above the ground.
http://www.heavens-above.com/IssHeight.aspx

Texas

The Texas Almanac measures the longest straight line from east to west across at Texas at 773 miles.
http://texasalmanac.com/topics/environment/environment

Distance between LA to NYC

Google Maps measures the distance from Los Angeles to NYC. as 2777 miles.
See on Google Maps

To the Moon and Back

The distance traveled in a trip "to the moon and back" is equal to twice the distance of the moon from the earth (238,800 miles), plus one half the circumference of the moon (6,784 miles) - 484,384 miles. This is because a space craft would generally rely on the gravity of the moon to sling shot it back to Earth.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5984252/and-now-for-a-sense-of-scale-a-map-of-the-us-overlaid-on-the-moon

Mars

Universe Today makes mention of the longest and smallest distances from the Earth to Mars. We're using the closest expected approach with Mars in 2016, at 46.8 million miles.
http://www.universetoday.com/14824/distance-from-earth-to-mars/

Saturn

Space.com defines the furthest and nearest distances between Saturn and Earth. We averaged the two to arrive at 873,000,000 miles.
http://www.space.com/18477-how-far-away-is-saturn.html

AREA COMPARISONS IN ft2

Parking Space

The Dept. of Tranportation lists standard parking space dimensions as 20 ft by 8 ft, or 160 square feet.
http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/HTM/2003r1/part3/fig3b-18_longdesc.htm

Tennis Court

The area of a regulation tennis court is 78 ft by 36 ft, or 2,808 square feet, including doubles lanes.
http://www.courtdimensions.net/tennis-court/index.php

National Mall and Parks

The National Park Conservancy Association lists the National Mall and Memorial Parks at "over 43,560,000 square feet."
https://www.npca.org/parks/national-mall-and-memorial-parks

Manhattan

New World states that Manhattan's land mass is measured to be 640,088,000 square feet.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Manhattan