Carbon pawprint: Why pet food giant Purina wants to restore Europe’s kelp, oysters and seaweed forests

Britons love their pets. From dogs and cats to goldfish and guinea pigs, all the way through to budgies and tarantulas, more than half of British households are estimated to own a domesticated animal of some kind.

That amounts to some 38 million pets in the U.K. which need feeding, exercising and caring for on a daily basis by their doting owners.

But while Britain’s pets provide immense company, affection and entertainment at home, they are also — just like humans — quietly leaving behind stubborn and too-often overlooked carbon pawprints.

Data from the Netherlands in a 2019 study, for example, estimated the average pet dog’s carbon footprint at around 1.4 tonnes per year, with cats emitting around a quarter of a tonne. If the same carbon footprint applied to pets in the U.K., the impact on the country’s carbon emissions would clearly be significant: Industry association UK Pet Food estimates the country is home to 13.5 million dogs and 12.5 million cats.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the huge climate impact of the global food system, pet food is a huge contributor to our animals’ planetary impact. Indeed, food systems for both humans and pets contribute to 80 percent of global deforestation, 29 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and are also the single largest cause of biodiversity loss. One recent study also calculated that feeding wet food to a dog roughly the size of a standard Dachshund generated the equivalent of 6,541kg of CO2 emissions each year.

And so, as with the proliferation of plant-based offerings for human diets, pressure has been mounting on pet food brands to develop lower carbon alternatives for increasingly eco-conscious consumers, which has been driving greener product development across the sector. Only last month, the U.K. became the first European country to approve the sale of lab-grown chicken from pet food start-up Meatly for example, while a number of firms have sought to serve up pea or insect protein as alternatives to meat in pet food.

Even so, convincing cat and dog owners to put lower carbon options on the menu for their pets’ mealtimes is far from a walk in the park.  

But, driven by broader decarbonization and sustainability goals, sector stalwart Nestlé Purina PetCare Europe – which produces household pet food brands Felix, Purina ONE, Gourmet and Pro Plan – remains doggedly determined to push forward with efforts to drive down emissions associated with its products.

As well as relying more heavily on fish and meat by-product ingredients to cut carbon and waste, the Nestlé-owned firm has also introduced a suite of broader measures to reduce the impact from more traditional pet food.

In 2022, for example, Purina Europe launched half a dozen goals to support responsible pet ownership this decade. These include targets to halve emissions, reduce excess nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers in its agricultural supply chain, and to finally acquire 20 percent of its cereals and vegetable protein from regenerative farming by 2025 rising to 50 percent of by 2030. That comes on top of the company’s broader commitment to help reverse nature loss.

Moreover, given its widespread use of fish by-products in its pet food, Purina is working with global partners such as the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership on efforts to help boost ocean health specifically. And, as well as supporting Fishery Improvement Projects, the firm has pledged action on seaweed and seagrass restoration to boost carbon capture, promote biodiversity and better manage harmful nutrients.

To that end, the firm launched its Ocean Restoration Program in early 2024 in a bid to restore 3,700 acres – around 3,700 football pitches – of critical marine habitat by initially funding projects in the Netherlands, France’s Arcachon Bay, Tromsø in Arctic Norway and Cascais and Peniche on Portugal’s Atlantic coast. Additional sites in Germany and the U.K. are also being developed.

Solutions being deployed range from planting seagrass meadows and seaweed forests to reconstructing oyster reefs and removing excess sea urchins. So far, these efforts have been piloted at a smaller scale. But in order to truly make wavs, further support is required, explains Kerstin Schmeiduch, Purina Europe’s director of corporate communications and sustainability.

“With marine biodiversity declining dramatically, collective restoration efforts are required,” she says. “At Purina, we are committed to playing our part to help address the marine biodiversity loss in our extended supply chain. Therefore, together with our partners, we are taking an active role to help restore marine habitats at-scale in Europe.

“There’s so much more focus on the ocean now – it has been neglected a lot and is one of the most underfunded sustainable development goals,” Schmeiduch adds. “It’s 70 percent of our planet. What is great to see is that a lot of start-ups have been building over recent years.”

Going ‘one step further’

Given the scale of U.K.’s environmental pawprint, as well as that of Purina’s supply chain, the pet food giant sought sniff out a “compass” — or reference point — to steer its regeneration strategy, Schmeiduch tells BusinessGreen Intelligence.

Here, the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries Framework offered a strong starting point, she explains. The Framework presents a set of nine planetary boundaries within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive, such as climate change, ocean acidification, biogeochemical flows, land system and freshwater change.

“We looked at the framework and assessed how we impact each of its planetary boundaries and how them impact our supply resilience and ability as a business to thrive,” Schmeiduch says. “When we looked at our supply chain, where we operate, where we have an impact, and the ingredients we source — we use the soil for cereals and vegetables, and the ocean for fish.”

After measuring impact from the likes of fertilizers and land across each of the Framework’s action areas, Schmeiduch says the firm initially sought overarching solutions to challenge areas dredged up by the analysis.

“Of course they’re interconnected; they don’t operate in isolation,” she explains.

“We started to address for example, the cereals and vegetables in our supply chain with regenerative agriculture and looking after healthy soil, because that will ultimately help us reduce the emission factors of the ingredients we use.”

To this end, Purina took stock of the impact of fertilizers and measures to reduce nitrogen phosphorus in its agricultural supply chain, cut carbon and ultimately avoid nutrient run-off into the ocean — for example, launching a three-year study on seaweed-based bio stimulants in regenerative agriculture.

To that end, Purina took stock of the impact of its fertilizer use and the measures it had introduced to reduce nitrogen phosphorus in its agricultural supply chain, cut carbon emissions and avoid nutrient run-off into the ocean, as part of which it launched a three-year study of seaweed-based bio stimulants in regenerative agriculture.

“It’s one ecosystem, right? Everything that you put on the land ends up in the ocean,” she says. “But if you look at the state of the ocean, it’s pretty dramatic.”

Valuing the ocean

According to a study by Allianz Trade, if the world’s oceans were an economy it would be the seventh largest in the world, with the total value of its goods and services amounting to a whopping $2.5 trillion per year.

But these critical services provided by the ocean are under severe threat from climate change and environmental damage, prompting growing calls for action to stem the tide of destruction worldwide. Grim forecasts have warned that under a “business as usual” scenario there could be no fish left in the oceans by as soon as 2048, while stark estimates suggest that just 15 percent of the world’s fisheries are in relatively good condition, with the remaining 85 percent depleted by overfishing, pollution and climate change, or in a fragile state of recovery.

Against that backdrop, Purina argues feeding pets a byproduct-based diet still rich in Omega-3, vitamins, minerals and protein has a key role to play in cutting carbon emissions from pet food. But beyond that, too, Schmeiduch maintains that the firm also has a broader responsibility to both source responsibly and restore the North Atlantic habitats which supply its predominantly white fish offcuts.

“We have done a lot of work on responsible sourcing and bycatch, but we need to take it one step further and look after the big ecosystem from which we source our ingredients,” she adds.

“As part of our responsible sourcing policy all of our suppliers have to comply with Nestlé responsible sourcing standards. That means we need to know where our ingredients come from, how they are produced, and if there are any environmental or social issues linked to it.”

‘Interconnectivity’ of marine challenges

Purina’s marine efforts cast a wide net, encompassing its Ocean Restoration Program, efforts to collaborate with Europe’s recently surfaced marine start-ups towards tackling biodiversity loss, and the company’s broader efforts to support ocean regeneration.

For example, Purina was a founding sponsor of The Bycatch Solutions Hub launched in 2023 by the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, while parent company Nestlé recently joined the likes of HQ Capital and The Green Earth Impact Fund managed by Schroders and BlueOrchard in backing the Ocean 14 Capital Fund I, which invests in entrepreneurs and businesses working to reduce negative impacts on ocean ecosystems.

More recently, Purina Europe joined Norwegian Marine Restoration as a founding member alongside the Bellona Foundation, Urchinomics, Tarevoktere and IFF to scale kelp forest restoration in Norway by working to make marine restoration a priority in national policy and regulations as well as unlocking further state and private funding.

Schmeiduch adds that the Ocean Restoration Programme is structured to help partners restoring critical species across Europe scale solutions and share knowledge with a view to replicating successes across the continent. Moving forward, it is hoped the scheme can deliver new training, employment and business opportunities for affected communities.

“When we started to look into these solutions, we thought we needed something that worked with various species, because the ecosystem and marine habitat isn’t comprised of just one species by itself,” says Schmeiduch.

And while she explains that Purina viewed seaweed and kelp as a “powerful” starting point, initial work soon revealed the true extent of “interconnectivity” between Purina’s supply chain and broader ecological issues.

“You find out that in the north of Norway seaweed can’t grow because there are massive ‘urchin barrens’ where the urchins have been growing because we have overfished their natural predators,” she offers as an example. “You can’t just grow kelp without trying to solve the other issue as well.

“We wanted to have a more novel approach to try to find expert partners, look at all species at the same time in order to really help drive a multiplier effect,” Schmeiduch adds.

With the support of advisory partners — including sustainability consultancies Bright Tide and Article 13, as well as the Bellona Foundation — Purina carried out “detailed and substantiated screening” to identify organizations proven in small but critical marine ecosystems.

The process found Dutch conservation organisation Oyster Heavan, which leads cost-effective oyster reef restoration projects; Portugal’s SeaForester, which focuses on restoring rapidly disappearing seaweed by running mobile seaweed nurseries; the Sea Ranger Service, which trains and employs young people to carry out seagrass restoration; and Urchinomics, which hopes to restore kelp in Norway, Japan and California by turning ecologically destructive sea urchins into a high-valued seafood product.

“In order to be credible, we need partners that are expert in their fields,” Schmeiduch says. “They have all academic associations, scientific partners supporting them, and close connectivity to the local and fishing communities.”

Facilitating collaboration

The first phase of the program will prioritize research in order to help create the conditions to scale up restoration solutions from 2026.

There are challenges here, however. Schmeiduch highlights the lack of common measurement framework to gauge the success of marine restoration projects, and laments that ocean biodiversity and carbon benefits do not feature prominently enough for her liking in guidance from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the Science Based Targets Network.

“There’s a heavy terrestrial focus,” she says. “If you want to start measuring the impact on increasing biodiversity in marine habitat, we need to look at a baseline. That is not easy. There’s not a unified methodology available to take off the shelf so we’re working together to create one.

“If you look at how companies invest, we have net zero ambitions as Nestlé overall. You can invest in regenerative agriculture, look at your recipe reformulation, and measure carbon reduction or removal that you can count towards your targets. In terms of the biodiversity piece on the ocean, what is it that you can actually count?”

“Every location has its unique challenges and opportunities — to create something that fits together and then build interaction between different elements is just one piece,” Schmeiduch adds. “To do that so when you have very little regulatory framework for the ocean and the environment is huge for anybody who is operating in that space.”

Schmeiduch believes providing a platform for novel, emerging and often interconnected ocean habitat solutions, while at the same time creating a common methodology and helping to build the science behind it to measure and replicate success, is a “unique” combination. But, looking ahead, she cautions the program remains in its early stages, and that it now simply needs to start delivering.

“Everything that we have planned for phase one we need to get going,” she says. “We need to draw the baseline, we need to build it, we need to understand how the solutions work and how nature reacts.

“The ‘doing’ is really the science and creating the baseline — it’s really the research and development piece that needs to happen now.”

Longer-term, she argues that harnessing the “enormous potential” of the private sector and environmental organizations to work together to scale solutions remains a crucial undercurrent to tackling both ocean-based and broader climate challenges – including the collective carbon pawprint of cats and dogs.

“We don’t need incremental, we need exponential,” she says. “Incremental is not enough for the scale of the problem. We and other private sector companies could pool resources, knowledge, expertise — there’s so much going on, so much science. How do we bring that together and facilitate collaboration to tackle common challenges?”

For Schmeiduch, who claims to have started her own “ocean literacy” journey just two years ago when Purina started to piece together its Ocean Restoration Program, engagement and urgency are crucial in delivering much needed solutions at scale. “I think a little bit of ocean literacy goes a long way,” she says.

Schmeiduch highlights oysters as an example, pointing out the incredible ecosystem services they provide, with each capable of filtering 53 gallons of water a day from nitrogen, phosphorus and other pollutants.

“Why do we care about oysters?” she asks. “They’re amazing filter machines, but we have lost 90 percent of them in Europe. That has an impact on the health of the ocean. To learn more about the power of all these species is something that gets you in awe and creates that momentum to get going and build something new.”

“Sometimes it’s just about starting something,” she adds. “We can try to perfect everything on paper, but ultimately, I think you’re as well doing it, learning, reacting and reiterating in order to start working towards solutions — and inviting others to join.”

As ever, the proof of Purina’s efforts will be in the pudding. But if the firm’s efforts to decarbonise and cut the environmental impact of its pet food prove successful, then Britain’s millions of doting pet owners may soon be able to care for their beloved animals without harming the planet.

This article was originally published on BusinessGreen.