Chicken vs Eggs: carbon footprint
Chicken or Eggs? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Chicken runs about 9.87 kg CO₂e a kilo. Eggs runs 4.67.
Chicken is the heavier choice, about 2.1× Eggs.
Swap Chicken for Eggs and you cut about 5.2 kg a kilo, near 53% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 30 km drive in a diesel car.
Chicken: Cows and sheep burp methane and need a lot of land and feed, which is why red meat towers over everything else here.
Eggs: Middling. Hens eat feed, but there's no methane belch, so eggs sit well below beef.
Per-kilo numbers skip portion size and how the food was farmed, so take them as the shape of things, not the last word.
More match-ups
Figures from OWID / Poore & Nemecek 2018, licensed CC-BY 4.0.
How we get these numbers: Methodology.