Looking into how much energy is avoided from being wasted when the ingredient (a butternut squash) is eaten instead of thrown out.
I realise that I am proposing a very wobbly average. Calculating the exact CO2 emissions of a pumpkin travelling to my supermarket requires access to data that I don’t have time to look for, so I am going for an approximation of the truth. However I didn’t want to lie outright on my app because I want to understand if including this gamification of how much kgCO2 you save by eating your food is something that would be interesting to people and for that to be the case I wanted the information displayed to be closer to the truth than an uninformed guess.
kgCO2 cost of the travel distance
According to Foodmiles, transporting a butternut squash from Spain to Brussels (where all my user testers are based and from where I see most frequently that butternut squashes originate) costs a car approximately 237 kgCO2 (Foodmiles 2024).
How many pumpkins fit in a container
The cubic feet of standardised european containers is 2895 cubic feet (The Geography of Transport Systems 2024). Gogle tells me this is 81.9 m3 (the metric system is easier to work with).
Now I calculated the rough cubic metre of a butternut squash with one I have at home.
10cm x 18 cm x 9 cm = 1620 cm3
1620 cm3 = 0.00162 m3
Now I look at how this translates over to pumpkins in containers
european container m3 / average pumpkin m3 = average of how many pumpkins can fit in a european container
81.9/0.001620 = 50555.5555556 → round up to an average of 50 556 pumpkins in a full european container
It feels a little excessive to me that there would be so many pumpkins transported in one container, the logistical nightmare alone of keeping all of this food supermarket worthy throughout the processing makes me think this is an impractical approach to food distribution. I have more faith than this in the logisticians of Europe.
I have decided therefore to consider a third of a container to be full of pumpkins which is aproximately 16 851 pumpkins (55 556 / 3 = 16 851). This is still a lot of pumpkins as far as I am concerned but I am aware that this is an attempt at a number and not as factually correct as would be possible if I had access to more data, such as how many pumpkins are in fact transported to Belgium from Spain.