If you’ve ever thought about the amount of energy — or waste — that is generated for your family’s hearty Thanksgiving dinner, there’s a new tool to help you reduce your carbon footprint.
Or, uh, your carbon turkey leg.
Ndustrial, a software company that uses AI to help energy-intensive industries make smarter climate decisions, has launched a first-of-its-kind Turkey Tracker to outline the journey these Thanksgiving birds take “from farm to fork.”
Complete with maps, graphs, and a “cornucopia” of data on the carbon emissions created by these birds, users can explore the turkey supply chain and learn more about how they can reduce energy costs for the big day.
In the United States, 210 million turkeys are produced every year, and 46 million of those are consumed on Thanksgiving alone. The average turkey weighs over 30 pounds and is shipped over 1,500 miles from more than 2,500 turkey farms to millions of tables across the country.
This tracker translates all of this data into a single turkey’s journey, following the fictional feathered friend from Mayberry, NC to Plymouth, MA.
As users follow along, they can zoom in on things like the turkey’s diet on the farm, how many hours it spends on a diesel-powered truck, the energy used to refrigerate the bird, and more.
“Ndustrial’s turkey tracker shines an oven light on the critical variables that shape carbon emissions and costs for one of the most popular and symbolic foods in America: the Thanksgiving turkey,” Ndustrial co-founder and CEO Jason Massey said in a statement.
“It’s stuffed with all of the fowl-facts businesses and consumers need to know about the turkey supply chain, offering insights on ways we can improve the emissions of a turkey’s journey across the U.S.”
All of the data in the tracker is compared to a more “optimized” version, which considers energy-efficient alternatives that can be employed to the turkey’s journey instead.
This includes things like short-haul electric trucks, solar powered processing plants, trailer electrification for refrigerated transit, and even small changes in temperatures and logistics to optimize the energy required for safe storage.
The tracker even considers energy efficiency in grocery stores, advocating for LED lights, freezer doors, and motion sensors to save energy.
And most applicable to us everyday eaters, the tracker reminds folks how they can make their turkey’s journey even more efficient, like consolidating trips to the grocery store and being mindful about food waste.
“Buy local and natural options if you can, choose efficient transportation where feasible, and always use the leftovers,” the tracker reads. “Minimizing food waste is one of the most important things we can all do.”
Ndustrial does use AI to measure optimizations for industries, like the turkey supply chain, which has its own environmental drawbacks. That said, folks can still use this tool to make their own choices about how they intentionally mitigate harm to the environment.
“Consumers are hungry to understand the environmental impact of their purchasing decisions now more than ever, but want the information to be served up to them on a silver platter,” Massey said.
“Factors like buying organic; going local; or roasting, smoking, or deep-frying are all important considerations, which is why we’ve designed this tool to bring simplicity back to the Thanksgiving dinner table.”
Header images courtesy of Kaboompics/Pexels and Ndustrial
