Food · emission factor
The Carbon Footprint of Olive Oil
200 g CO₂e / 100g
Olive oil carries a footprint of roughly 200 g CO₂e per 100 g, based on the global life-cycle analysis by Poore & Nemecek (2018). That puts it in the same low band as tofu and nuts — and far below animal fats like butter, which comes from emissions-intensive dairy systems. For a fat that is consumed in small daily quantities, its climate impact per meal is modest.
Why olive oil's footprint is relatively low
Olive oil comes from a perennial tree crop, and that shapes its climate profile. Olive groves are not replanted each year, so soils are disturbed less than in annual cropping, and the trees themselves store carbon in wood and roots over decades. There is no animal in the supply chain, which removes the two biggest drivers of food emissions: methane from ruminant digestion and the feed conversion losses of livestock. The main emission sources are instead fertilizer production and use, irrigation pumping in drier regions, fuel for harvesting, and the milling and refining stages. Pressing oil is energy-light compared with, say, dairy processing. The result is a footprint around 200 g CO₂e per 100 g — a fraction of cheese at 1,350 g or beef at 2,990 g in the same dataset.
How it compares to butter and other fats
Among cooking fats, the plant-versus-animal divide is stark. Butter is a dairy product, so it inherits the methane and land-use burden of cattle: life-cycle studies consistently place it several times higher than vegetable oils per kilogram. Within plant oils, differences are smaller and depend more on land-use change than on the crop itself — palm oil grown on converted rainforest or peatland can carry a heavy deforestation penalty, while rapeseed, sunflower, and olive oil grown on established farmland cluster in a similar low range. Olive oil also has a co-benefit worth noting: traditional Mediterranean groves are long-lived agroecosystems that hold carbon in biomass and can support biodiversity, something annual oil crops do not replicate.
Water, transport, and what matters less
Two concerns people often raise about olive oil are irrigation and shipping. Water use is real — intensive modern groves in Spain and elsewhere increasingly rely on irrigation — but water footprint and carbon footprint are separate issues; the emissions from pumping are already counted in the life-cycle figure. Transport matters less than intuition suggests: sea freight is highly efficient per tonne-kilometre, and for most foods transport is under 10% of total food emissions, a pattern Poore & Nemecek documented across thousands of farms. So an olive oil shipped from the Mediterranean is not meaningfully worse than a locally pressed alternative. What moves the needle in your diet is substituting low-footprint fats and proteins for high-footprint ones, not the shipping label.
How olive oil compares
How to reduce this footprint
- ✓ Use olive oil in place of butter where flavour allows — butter's dairy origins make it several times more emissions-intensive per gram of fat.
- ✓ Buy larger containers (glass or tin) to cut packaging emissions per litre and reduce waste.
- ✓ Store oil away from heat and light so it lasts its full shelf life instead of going rancid and being discarded.
- ✓ Track your cooking staples for a week to see how fats compare with the proteins on your plate — the protein choice usually dominates.
Frequently asked questions
Is olive oil bad for the environment?
Relative to other foods, no. At about 200 g CO₂e per 100 g it sits in the low band alongside tofu and nuts, and well below animal products like cheese (1,350 g) or beef (2,990 g). Its main local concern is irrigation water in dry regions rather than greenhouse gases.
Which has a lower carbon footprint, olive oil or butter?
Olive oil, by a wide margin. Butter comes from dairy cattle, so it carries methane and land-use emissions that make it several times more climate-intensive per kilogram than vegetable oils. Swapping butter for olive oil is one of the easier fat-related reductions.
Does imported olive oil have a much bigger footprint than local oil?
Not significantly. Transport typically accounts for less than 10% of a food's total emissions, and bulk sea freight is very efficient. Where and how the olives are grown — fertilizer, irrigation energy, land use — matters far more than the distance the bottle travels.
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Sources & methodology: see Research & scientific references. Figures are averages used by the Decarbonr app; real-world values vary by production system, country, and occupancy.