Summary
This meta-analysis in the U.K. and Ireland assesses individual food products in relation to an environmental impact score, a comprehensive value formulated by combining land use, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water stress, and eutrophication (e.g. algal blooms) potential. Meat and dairy products top the lists as having the highest environmental impacts, with emphasis on beef and lamb as having impact scores above 10. Assessed in accordance with nutri-score health based values, highlighting a positive relationship between healthy food and sustainable food is a strength of the study. Limitations of the study include a lack of ingredient and trade supply chain transparency, packaging’s impact along the food chain as unaccounted for, and crucial plant-foods like legumes are excluded from the study. Findings of the study imply a need for a mass shift away from meat and dairy products, and show how this can be applied to realistic actions at an individual level. Even small substitutes away from meat and dairy products by many can reduce environmental impacts in a significant cumulative way.
Understanding and communicating the environmental impacts of food products is keyto enabling transitions to environmentally sustainable food systems [El Bilali andAllahyari, Inf. Process. Agric. 5, 456–464 (2018)]. While previous analyses comparedthe impacts of food commodities such as fruits, wheat, and beef [Poore and Nemecek,Science360, 987–992 (2018)], most food products contain numerous ingredients.However, because the amount of each ingredient in a product is often known only bythe manufacturer, it has been difficult to assess their environmental impacts. Here, wedevelop an approach to overcome this limitation. It uses prior knowledge from ingredi-ent lists to infer the composition of each ingredient, and then pairs this with environ-mental databases [Poore and NemecekScience360, 987–992 (2018); Gephart et al.,Nature 597, 360–365 (2021)] to derive estimates of a food product’s environmentalimpact across four indicators: greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water stress, andeutrophication potential. Using the approach on 57,000 products in the United King-dom and Ireland shows food types have low (e.g., sugary beverages, fruits, breads), tointermediate (e.g., many desserts, pastries), to high environmental impacts (e.g., meat,fish, cheese). Incorporating NutriScore reveals more nutritious products are often moreenvironmentally sustainable but there are exceptions to this trend, and foods consumersmay view as substitutable can have markedly different impacts. Sensitivity analyses indi-cate the approach is robust to uncertainty in ingredient composition and in most casessourcing. This approach provides a step toward enabling consumers, retailers, and pol-icy makers to make informed decisions on the environmental impacts of food products