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Food Carbon Footprint

Free Food Carbon Footprint calculator with clear step-by-step results.

About Food Carbon Footprint

Applies a life-cycle emission factor to a specific quantity of one food, then shows how food waste inflates the real footprint of what you eat. Throwing away 15% of a purchase raises the emissions per kilo consumed by nearly 18%, and none of that waste appears in a standard diet calculation.

Formulas

Total footprint

kgCO2e = mass kg x emission factor for the food

Footprint per kilo eaten

Per kg eaten = total footprint / (mass x (1 - waste share))

Worked example

With the default values below, Food Carbon Footprint returns Total footprint of the food bought of 15.00. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.

Inputs used

Mass of foodminimum 0 kg
2.5 kg
Food typeone of Beef (30 kgCO2e/kg), Lamb (24 kgCO2e/kg), Cheese (12 kgCO2e/kg), Pork (7 kgCO2e/kg), Chicken (6 kgCO2e/kg), Eggs (4.5 kgCO2e/kg), Rice (4 kgCO2e/kg), Vegetables (0.5 kgCO2e/kg), Legumes (0.9 kgCO2e/kg)
Chicken (6 kgCO2e/kg)
Share thrown away uneatenaccepts 0–80 %
15 %

Results

Total footprint of the food bought
15.00 kgCO2e
Footprint of the portion wasted
2.25 kgCO2e
Footprint per kilo actually eaten
7.06 kgCO2e/kg
Emission factor applied
6.00 kgCO2e/kg

Step by step

  1. 1Values used
  2. 2Total footprint
  3. 3Footprint per kilo eaten
  4. 4Total footprint of the food bought= 15.00 kgCO2e
  5. 5Footprint of the portion wasted= 2.25 kgCO2e
  6. 6Footprint per kilo actually eaten= 7.06 kgCO2e/kg
  7. 7Emission factor applied= 6.00 kgCO2e/kg

Assumptions and limits

  • The result is derived only from the 3 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
  • In particular, this calculator does not take inflation, tax, fees or charges or compounding frequency into account.
  • Figures are rounded for display to 2 decimal places, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.

How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is beef so much higher than chicken?

Enteric methane from rumen fermentation, a long growing period and low feed conversion efficiency combine to make ruminant meat roughly five times the intensity of poultry.

Do these factors include cooking?

No - they cover production through to retail. Household cooking and refrigeration typically add a further 5-10%, more for long-cooked dishes.

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