25 Sept 2025
Red meat-based foods were found to be particularly impactful across the environmental metrics measured in the study.
Chris Simpson
Job Title
Image © chalabala / Adobe Stock
Plant-based dog foods have a considerably lower impact on the environment than their meat-based counterparts, a new study has shown.
University of Nottingham scholars calculated the environmental impact of a range of dry dog foods by several metrics – land use, greenhouse gas emissions, acidifying emissions, eutrophying emissions (pollution of soil and water reservoirs) and freshwater withdrawal.
Overall, the plant-based foods had the lowest environmental impact scores for each parameter while red meat-based foods (beef or lamb) always had the highest, and poultry and semi-synthetic veterinary foods were consistently intermediate.
Published in Frontiers in Nutrition – Nutrition and Sustainable Diets, the study followed a previous paper by the same authors that determined plant-based dog foods are nutritionally similar to meat-based diets.
The authors examined the same 31 commercially available foods – 19 meat-based (7 poultry, 6 lamb, 6 beef), 6 veterinary and 6 plant-based (4 vegan, 2 vegetarian) – as they did in that paper.
Environmental impact scores were estimated per 1,000 kcal as fed for each metric.
The average estimated land use was 2.73m² for plant-based diets compared with 102.15m² for beef and 111.47m² for lamb.
According to the authors, exclusively feeding a 20kg labrador retriever – said to be the UK’s most popular dog – a beef or lamb-based diet across nine years of adult life would require around 52 or 57 football pitches worth of land, respectively, compared with just 1.4 fields for a plant-based diet.
Plant-based foods had the lowest carbon dioxide equivalent emissions with 2.82kg compared with 12.85kg for lamb and 31.47kg for beef.
Where lifetime emissions produced by the plant-based foods would equate to 2.8 roundtrips between London and New York, per passenger, on a Boeing 747, emissions from beef foods would be equivalent to 31.3 roundtrips.
Acidifying values for beef were 14.3 times higher than for plant-based foods, while for eutrophying emissions they were 16.4 times higher.
Plant-based foods had the lowest average freshwater withdrawal at 249 litres per 1,000 kcal, while beef had more than double at 574.79L and lamb was highest at 683.84L.
Lead author Rebecca Brociek, of Nottingham’s School of Veterinary Medicine and Science, said: “Our findings show that there is a much greater environmental impact when producing meat-based pet food.
“We have already show in our previous work that plant-based diets at the point of purchase are roughly equivalent to others.
“This next paper is a case study of 31 supermarket-available dog foods, giving dog owners who factor sustainability into their purchases, guidance on how to also reduce their environmental pawprint.”
