Land, water, emissions

One litre of dairy milk costs 628 litres of water.

628 litresWater for 1 L of dairy milk
48 litresWater for 1 L of oat milk
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13x lessAbout 42 minutes in the shower
Poore & NemecekScience, 2018
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Per litre produced

Three measures. Dairy loses all three.

From a meta-analysis of roughly 38,700 farms across 119 countries, the largest study of food's environmental impact ever assembled, published in Science.

Freshwater use

litres per litre
Soy
27.8 L
Oat
48 L
Almond
371.5 L
Dairy milk
628 L

Soy uses about 22 times less freshwater than dairy. Almond, the thirstiest plant milk, still uses around 40% less.

Land use

square metres per litre
Almond
0.5 sq m
Soy
0.66 sq m
Oat
0.76 sq m
Dairy milk
8.95 sq m

Dairy needs nearly 12 times the land of oat. This is the widest gap of the three measures.

Greenhouse gas emissions

kg CO2e per litre
Almond
0.70 kg
Oat
0.90 kg
Soy
0.98 kg
Dairy milk
3.15 kg

Oat emits about 71% less than dairy, soy about 68% less, almond about 77% less. Roughly 45% of dairy's footprint is methane from the cow itself.

Source: J. Poore & T. Nemecek, Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers, Science 360, 987-992 (2018). Plant-milk figures are the additional calculations provided by J. Poore, as presented by Our World in Data. A litre of dairy and a litre of plant milk are not nutritionally identical: these charts compare environmental cost per litre, not nutritional equivalence.

Your own switch

What one glass a day adds up to.

Glasses of milk per day, in your home

4 glasses

1 12

1 glass = 200 ml

0

Freshwater saved per year

0 less CO2e · 0 of land freed up

Switching dairy to oat, using the per-litre figures above.

The bit most brands leave out

Almond milk is the thirstiest plant milk. We sell almond.

At 371.5 litres of water per litre, almond uses far more than oat or soy. It still uses around 40% less than dairy, and it has the lowest emissions of any milk on the chart, but on water alone it is the weakest of our range.

If freshwater is what you care about most, buy our oat or soy. We would rather tell you that than have you find it out somewhere else.

Why concentrate matters

We don't ship water across the country.

Ready-to-drink milk is about 90% water, and that water gets trucked from the plant to the warehouse to your door. A 500 g pack of our concentrate makes 6 litres. The water comes from your tap, which has already been delivered.

1:12

Concentrate ratio

500 g of concentrate becomes 6 litres of milk in your kitchen.

-92%

Freight weight

Six litres of finished milk moved as half a kilo. Fewer trucks for the same drinking.

Ambient

No cold chain

No refrigerated transport or storage, which is where a lot of dairy's energy goes.

Freight and dilution figures describe our own product. The -92% is arithmetic from the 500 g to 6 L ratio, not a life-cycle assessment. We have not had an independent LCA done on our supply chain.

Same glass, 13x less water Oat, soy, almond and cashew

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