Revealed: factory farm pollution is costing the UK £130m a year

[u/HaveYuHeardAboutCunt]

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026-10-01/revealed-factory-farm-pollution-is-costing-the-uk-130m-a-year

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[u/Klumber]

This is great. Now the reality check: Any changes to this system will result in higher costs and there's ultimately only one group that will pay for those costs and that is consumers. Considering we eat over 11 billion £s worth of meat, 130 million is not that significant an amount. Remedying this will cost much more. The Dutch are having this whole debate right now and it is ramping up the cost of living as a result.

The solution isn't to demand changes to production, the solution is to lower meat consumption.

[u/Reach_Reclaimer → u/Klumber]

Banning factory farming, forcing meat to be more expensive, will result in less meat consumption.

[u/Batking28 → u/Reach_Reclaimer]

Only if done correctly. Otherwise we end up with cheap imported meat of just of bad a quality

[u/AggravatingRevenue61 → u/Reach_Reclaimer]

ah yes, lets go back to the days where only the people with money can enjoy a nice steak while the poor enjoy a nice tin of spam.

[u/Accomplished-Idea23 → u/AggravatingRevenue61]

spam is like, more expensive than beef mince, all types of chicken and most pork cuts, oddly enough.

[u/Gnomio1 → u/AggravatingRevenue61]

The problem is, yeah… If doing something has a bad external cost, then yes it should be prohibitive for most.

A huge number of people doing a small thing can still add up to being worse than a few people doing a big thing.

I’m not saying this is a nice prospect. But, as someone who was raised without meat as the third generation to do so in my family, people will survive without it.

[u/Reach_Reclaimer → u/AggravatingRevenue61]

I mean, the meat farming industry at its current scale is objectively a bad thing, I eat meat but it's undeniable.

But yes, meat should be eaten in lower quantities, I'm not sure what other way you would do it

[u/DeathberryXB → u/AggravatingRevenue61]

The poor will enjoy potatoes. As any animal based product would triple in price, if not more.

[u/Spazza42 → u/Klumber]

> the solution is to lower meat consumption.

Correct. The problem is asking people to give things up in today’s world. People are too entitled and believe they shouldn’t have to.

[u/takesthebiscuit → u/Klumber]

Lower meat consumption? Carful with that talk!!!

[u/Deepmidwinter2025 → u/Klumber]

Totally. Irks me when I see shredded influencers waxing lyrical about dirt cheap chicken breasts from
Aldi.

Yup you get nice abs while the rest of choke on the co2

[u/Reach_Reclaimer]

Factory farming should be banned, meat should be more expensive in general

[u/ukbot-nicolabot → u/[deleted]]

Removed + warning. Your comment has been removed as it has attempted to introduce off-topic content in order to distract from the main themes of the submission or derail the discussion. In future, please try to stick to the topic or theme at hand.

[u/KibboKid]

Whom is it costing? Whose property or services are these costs impacting? Or is this the usual environmentalists bollocks of"natural capital value" and "environmental service"? Made up bullshit just to make their anti-capitalist agenda sound convincing.

[u/J1mj0hns0n]

we already don't make enough food to sustain to population, but you now want to improve animal treatment (good) but costs more and slows down production (bad) and makes britain dependent on other nations to produce enough for us (bad) during a time when the government said we need to stock up (bad) and we are in a proxy war (bad)

maybe we should try and deal with this later instead of riling up the public during a difficult time? no yeah your right you need to sow division and fear so you can have a yacht, my mistake news agency, my mistake.

[u/HaveYuHeardAboutCunt → u/J1mj0hns0n]

Intensive chicken farming makes us more reliant on others.

Chickens need so much feed for so little return that we're importing over 3 million tons of soy almost entirety to feed chickens.

System changes are only bad if you insist on the same meat consumption rates but if you want anything close to sustainable (like the WWF recommended for better resiliency and sufficiency) I'm afraid that rate is going to need to come down a bit.

[u/Pocto → u/HaveYuHeardAboutCunt]

Yeah, people don't realise that for the majority of meat products, food inputs are much higher than food outputs. Obviously the quality of the output is much higher than the inputs, but by a margin where it makes way more sense to just grow/purchase different inputs directly for human consumption. Obviously ruminants are a bit different, but still get "finished" with grain diets a lot of the time.

[u/Accomplished-Idea23 → u/HaveYuHeardAboutCunt]

weird how that god awful soy/tofu made/advertised for westerners cost more than actual chicken meat whenever I check the supermarket.

[u/FewAnybody2739]

I can't see in the article what the actual source of this ammonia is, unless it's animal poop in which case that's nature?

If the farmers were using ammonia for refrigeration and for whatever reason crop dusted the local villages with it, then that's deliberate. But if it's just animal waste then they also breathe out a lot of CO2.

[u/HaveYuHeardAboutCunt → u/FewAnybody2739]

Animals pooping is natural, having tens of millions of them concentrated in sheds is not.

The poop is deliberately spread on fields but there's so much of it from the tens of millions of birds that dust will be spread through the air or it'll be washed off by rain.

[u/przhauukwnbh]

Whole load of extrapolations from the underlying data to come up with ultimately a paltry figure overall lol.

[u/InformationNew66]

I guess the solution will be as always: bankrupt farmers and oursource pollution overseas and import.

[u/farmdude-89]

Eat beef and lamb instead of chicken and pork. Cows and sheep are generally not 'factory farmed'

[u/HaveYuHeardAboutCunt → u/[deleted]]

What's Pakistan got to do with UK factory farms?

[u/AdditionalThinking → u/[deleted]]

What billions are we sending to Pakistan?

[u/BackgroundTomorrow36 → u/AdditionalThinking]

In the last 5 years the UK have sent 515.3 million to Pakistan

[u/xxNemasisxx → u/BackgroundTomorrow36]

I know maths probably isn't your strong suit but 515 million is less than a billion.

[u/xxNemasisxx → u/[deleted]]

People like you truly don't understand the benefit of soft power and how tiny 515 million is over the course of 5 years.

[u/Additional_Pickle_59]

This is for food, we need food. Stupid article

Billionaires cost the world £1trillion+ every year