Plant-based diets add to the wastewater phosphorus burden
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Global food production and current reliance on meat-based diets requires a large share of natural resource use and causes widespread environmental pollution including phosphorus (P). Transitions to less animal-intensive diets address a suite of sustainability goals, but their impact on society’s wastewater P burden is unclear. Using the UK as our example, we explored historical diet changes between 1942 and 2016, and how shifting towards plant-based diets might impact the P burden entering wastewater treatment works (WWTW), and subsequent effluent P discharge to receiving water bodies. Average daily per capita P intake declined from its peak in 1963 (1599 mg P pp −1 d −1 ) to 1354 mg P pp −1 d −1 in 2016. Since 1942, the contribution of processed foods to total P consumption has increased from 21% to 52% in 2016, but consumption of total animal products has not changed significantly. Scenario analysis indicated that if individuals adopted a vegan diet or a low-meat (‘EAT- Lancet’) diet by 2050, the P burden entering WWTW increased by 17% and 35%, respectively relative to baseline conditions in 2050. A much lower P burden increase (6%) was obtained with a flexitarian diet. An increasing burden of P to WWTW threatens greater non-compliance with regulatory targets for P discharge to water, but also presents an opportunity to the wastewater industry to recycle P in the food chain, and reduce reliance on finite phosphate rock resources. Sustainable diets that reduce food system P demand pre-consumption could also provide a source of renewable fertilizers through enhanced P recovery post-consumption and should be further explored.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.019 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".