Dog Food Imprint

For this emission factor, we used the paper: The global environmental paw print of pet food, 2020

A few comments on the methodology used in this article:

Animal by-products (ABPs) are products of animal origin not consumed by humans, and are the main ingredients of food for... animals.

We might imagine that transforming these "leftovers" to feed our animals is the best option, but we mustn't forget that there are alternatives: fertilizer, biofuel.

While 1kg of animal "by-products" certainly doesn't have the same environmental impact as a kilogram of steak, we can't consider the impact to be zero. Nevertheless, as you might imagine, there are no EFs associated with these by-products. The idea of this article is to to approximate the footprint of these products by prorating them by product price.

The final result is 2.3 times higher using a conventional method based on : 1kg animal by-products = 1kg steak = 1 EF in kgco2e/kg.

As far as feed "quality" is concerned, two types of feed are considered:

• Classic" dog food (croquette type): 3 kgCO2e/kg, making up 2/3 of the average dog food.
• Premium" dog food (closer to paté, it seems): 7 kgCO2e/kg, making up 1/3 of the average dog's diet.

This gives an average value of 4.3 kgCO2e/kg of dog food.

A priori, only the production part is accounted for. We'd have to go into more detail to find out whether distribution or packaging is taken into account.

Finally, with regard to geographical scope, this study is based on data for the United States, which would seem, given the similarity of markets with Europe, to be legitimately applicable to France.

Furthermore, the study Environmental impact of diets for dogs and cats, 20222 gives much higher results, particularly for "wet food".

If a 10 kg dog with an average caloric intake of 534 kcal per day15 is considered, we can estimate the yearly consumption of calories and, therefore, can estimate the annual environmental impact. If we consider the results of the present study, the median of CO2eq of a dry diet per 1000 kcal is 4.25 kg and a wet diet of 33.56 kg. This average dog would be responsible for 828.37 kg of CO2eq per year if consuming dry diets or 6,541 kg of CO2eq per year if consuming wet diets.

In view of the particularly high figures, and pending further investigation of this study, we have preferred to use the figures from the study mentioned above, which appears to adopt a consistent methodology.