Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff, Laurens vocal bomb here. Sure we all know people who prefer gummy bears, liquorice, or peanut brittle, but let's be honest, chocolate lovers outnumber those other weirdos by a significant margin. Chocolate is full of fat and sugar and laced with caffeine, but its sales have been steadily increasing in the United States over the past decade, even as overall candy sales
have declined. The results of some recent studies have even implied that chocolate might be considered a health food with heavy scare quotes. But have you ever considered the environmental impact of that chocolate stash you have hidden in your
desk drawer. Some researchers at the University of Manchester wondered about it, and so they calculated the carbon footprint of chocolate production in the United Kingdom by considering each element of chocolate production, from the individual ingredients, to the manufacturing processes to the packaging. When you consider its carbon footprint,
chocolate has a dark side. The researchers focused on the three chocolate products that make up of the country's chocolate market individually sold milk, chocolate bars, sharing bags, and molded chocolate sold by weight. The research team calculated that the UK chocolate industry produces about two point three tons that's two point one metric tons of greenhouse gases each year, as much as would be produced by a city the
size of Belfast, Ireland or El Paso, Texas. Perhaps more alarmingly, it takes about two hundred and sixty four gallons that's a thousand liters of water to produce a single chocolate bar. The research team took into consideration not only the transportation and production of raw materials necessary to manufacture chocolate, but also the energy and natural resources, transportation, distribution and storage,
and post consumer waste involved in the process. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that the most environmentally problematic chocolate products were these sharing bags large bags of individually wrapped candies, since
their ingredients and excessive packaging carry larger carbon footprints. Of all the ingredients contained in chocolate, the cocoa, which is shipped to the UK from countries in West Africa and Central in South America, and the milk, the production of which is incredibly energy intensive, pack the most punch as
far as greenhouse gas production is concerned. In a press release, the lead author of the study, Adiza as a Paget, head of Sustainable Industrial Systems at the University of Manchester, said, it is true that our love of chocolate has environmental consequences for the planet, but let's be clear, we aren't saying people should stop eating it. The point of this
study is to raise consumers awareness and enable more informed choices. Also, we hope this work will help the chocolates industry to target environmental hotspots in the supply chains and make chocolate products as sustainable as possible. We hope so too. Today's episode was written by Jesseln Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other rich topics, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.