UK Food Emissions

What?

What is this? This website enables conscious businesses and people to measure their food & drink emissions.

Calculating itemised food and drink emissions can be challenging and inefficient [1][2]. This tool takes a different approach by using aggregated data, standardising the process, and empowering people to quickly and conveniently record their emissions. The details can be found in the Methodology section.

Who?

Who is this for? Environmentally conscious business employees and individuals wanting to measure and reduce their food and drink emissions.

Why?

Why should I do this? By measuring food and drink emissions, we're taking the first step to emissions reduction. If your business already tracks transport emissions, the case for measuring your food and drink emissions is convincing. For example, by choosing Vegan over a Meat and Dairy diet for 2 days could save the equivalent emissions of travelling 89 miles by train [3].

How?

How do I use this? The fundamental idea is to measure the emissions of the food and drink that a business pays for on an individual basis. For example, if an individual goes on a 2 day business trip, these food and drink emissions are recorded.

On the Home page, you can optionally enter the trip start date, then the number of days of the trip. Next, for each meal of the day including Breakfast, Lunch, Evening Meals, and Everything Else (snacks), the number of days that each diet (including Vegan, Vegetarian and Meat & Dairy) is followed should be selected.

Don't worry if your diet doesn't follow the standard Breakfast, Lunch, Evening Meal format, simply distribute your 'days' to each mealtime however you feel best represents your diet for each day. You must allocate all of your trip days to each meal time.

References

[1] 'Climate change food calculator: What's your diet's carbon footprint?', Nassos Stylianou, Clara Guibourg and Helen Briggs, BBC News, 2019

[2] 'Carbon Calculator', Dr Helen Harwatt, Small World Consulting, Blueberry Consultants, plateupfortheplanet.org

[3] 'How bad are bananas?', Mike Berners-Lee, Profile Books, 2020