Butter: carbon footprint per kg
Live factor value
3.26 kgCO2e per kg
Source: The Big Climate Database (CONCITO, Denmark), 1.2 (revision 1). Factor set bcd-1.2-r1.
Butter carries a surprisingly large number for something used a spoonful at a time — the live figure is below, and it sits above several of the meats in this database. The arithmetic is concentration: it takes many litres of milk to make a kilogram of butter, so every kilogram inherits the emissions of a dairy herd many times over.
That said, the per-kilogram figure overstates butter's role in a real diet, because almost nobody eats a kilogram of it. A useful way to read this page is alongside the portion in the worked example rather than the headline number — the footprint of a week's butter is small, while the footprint of a week's cheese, made the same way from the same milk, is not.
Worked example
A 250 g pack of butter: 0.25 × 3.26 = 0.8 kgCO2e.
Measure your own with the free food calculator.
Frequently asked questions
- Why is butter higher than milk per kilogram?
- Because butter is concentrated milk fat. A kilogram of butter takes many litres of milk to produce, and the footprint of all that milk lands on the finished kilogram.
- Is margarine lower-carbon than butter?
- Plant-oil spreads generally carry lower factors than dairy butter, but the database's spread entries are separate products with their own figures — see the food calculator to compare specific items rather than assuming a category rule.