Yogurt: carbon footprint per kg
Live factor value
0.51142961 kgCO2e per kg
Source: The Big Climate Database (CONCITO, Denmark), 1.2 (revision 1). Factor set bcd-1.2-r1.
Plain yogurt is one of the lowest-carbon dairy products in The Big Climate Database, close behind liquid milk itself — the live figure is below. Unlike cheese and butter, yogurt is barely concentrated: a kilogram of yogurt is made from roughly a kilogram of milk, so it inherits the milk footprint almost one-for-one rather than several times over.
That is what makes the dairy section legible. The mozzarella and butter our other pages cover are the same milk with the water taken out, and both land several times higher — which is why swapping a cheese course for a yogurt moves a weekly shop more than most people expect. Read the whole dairy list with some care, though: a handful of cheese rows in this database sit implausibly near zero, which looks like a defect in the source data rather than a finding about cheese.
Worked example
A 500 g pot of plain yogurt: 0.5 × 0.51142961 = 0.3 kgCO2e.
Measure your own with the free food calculator.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Greek yogurt higher-carbon than plain yogurt?
- Strained yogurt is more concentrated, so per kilogram it carries more milk. That is the same effect that puts butter and mozzarella several times above plain yogurt here.
- How does yogurt compare with plant-based alternatives?
- This database publishes both, so the comparison is like-for-like: its fortified soy and oat drinks sit below plain yogurt, and its almond, pea and rice drinks bracket it. Dairy yogurt is not an outlier against plant drinks the way cheese and butter are.