Mapping environmental impact of food purchases across UK
Merging a loyalty card transactional dataset from a prominent UK retailer with environmental impacts associated with food production, this study aims to assess the environmental footprint attributable to food purchases across the UK.
Duration: January 2024 - ongoing
Funder:
ESRC, DF Accelerator Grant
Partners:
University of Oxford and the Grant’s advisory panel.
Key people:
Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)
This research relates to the following SDGs
Research summary
Clark et al. (2022) estimated environmental impacts of 57000 food products in UK retail by merging previous databases and deriving a single environmental impact score per 100 g of product that ranges from 0 (no impact) to 100 (highest impact). This score does not include transportation or packaging, but includes environmental impact associated with food production combined across four indicators: greenhouse gas emissions (mainly CO2), land use, water stress, and eutrophication potential.
The highest impact not surprisingly with estimated scores >10 goes to food that contains beef and lamb products. Preliminary exploration starts with the freely available data on environment impact across four indicators for 212 products from Clark et al’ s estimations and then averages the impact by food category. Having aggregated loyalty card data per month and food category, this study gets the total emissions per month for food purchased from a UK retailer. In addition, using the location of the shop where the loyalty card transaction is happening, we group the purchases within the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) decile and estimate the environmental footprint per decile.
Finally, having in mind four key environmental awareness events: Earth Day in April, World Environmental Day in June, Plastic Bag Free Day in July, and World Animal Day in October – this study considers 3 weeks around each event in order to find whether consumer behaviours have been altered.
Further information
For more information please visit the N/LAB food impact project page.
