Plant-based dog food cuts environmental “pawprint,” UK study reveals

Plant-based dog food production has a lower impact on the environment compared to red meat options, a study by the University of Nottingham, UK reveals. The findings can provide sustainability-conscious pet owners with guidance on lowering their environmental “pawprint.”

Pet food manufacturing contributes significantly to global environmental pressures, driven largely by animal-derived ingredients, with dogs and cats consuming nearly 9% of livestock animals globally. Studies also link dry dog food production to 1.1 %-2.9 % of global agricultural emissions.

For the study, the scientists quantified the environmental impact of 31 dry dog foods sold in the UK, categorized as plant-based, red-meat-based, and veterinary-renal diets.

They found that plant-based varieties had the lowest environmental impact across all measures, such as the land needed for production, greenhouse gas emissions, soil and water pollution, and freshwater withdrawal.

Meanwhile, poultry-based and veterinary diets were “intermediate,” while beef and lamb-based foods had substantially higher impacts than 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),” notes the study.

Driving sustainable purchases

The findings, published in Frontiers in Nutrition-Nutrition and Sustainable Diets, follow the team’s earlier study, which demonstrated that vegan dog food sold in the UK provides similar nutrition to meat-based diets.

“We have already shown in our previous work that plant-based diets at the point of purchase are roughly equivalent to others,” says lead author Rebecca Brociek from the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science.

“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 also to reduce their environmental pawprint.”

Globally, environmentally friendly pet food choices have increased in recent years as sustainability and ethical concerns drive purchases. Last year, the global plant-based pet food market grew by nearly 9.5 %, according to research from the University of Winchester, UK.

Ingredient firms are also innovating in alternative pet food solutions, with Corbion formulating algae-based solutions as a lower-footprint substitute for pet foods, which recently got the regulatory greenlight in China.