Reducing the environmental ‘paw-print’ - plant-based dog foods are better for the environment than red meat options

A new study, led by experts at the University of Nottingham, has found that the production of meat-based pet foods has a much greater impact on the environment in comparison to plant-based alternatives.

The study, led by Rebecca Brociek from the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science, and published in Frontiers in Nutrition - Nutrition and Sustainable Diets, showed that plant-based diets for pets had the lowest impact across all measures of environmental impact. This included the land needed to produce them, greenhouse gas emissions, the polluting effects of production on soil and water reservoirs, and freshwater withdrawal.

Pet food production contributes substantially to global environmental issues, driven largely by animal-derived ingredients.

In this study, experts quantified the environmental impact of 31 commercially available dry dog foods purchased in the UK, categorised as plant-based, red-meat based and veterinary-renal diets.

The environmental metrics were estimated using life cycle assessment datasets and adjusted for ingredient makeup, energy density and differences in moisture content, which were mostly taken from the dog food packaging.

The results showed that plant-based diets had the lowest impact across all measures of environmental impact. Poultry-based and veterinary diets were intermediate, while beef and lamb-based foods had substantially higher impact compared to all other foods.

For example, over nine years of adult life, a 20kg dog fed a beef-based diet was estimated to require 57 football fields worth of land to grow their food (versus 1.4 fields for plant-based).

This latest study comes after a previous study where the team showed that plant-based pet food sold in the UK provided similar nutrition to meat-based food.

“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,” says Rebecca, the lead author on the study.