The Choice of Milks

A few years ago I moved away from dairy milk and started drinking plant base ones.  The main reason was for health, I have PCOS and they recommend cutting out milk for that, but I was also aware of the environmental factors, such as carbon emissions, and water and land use, involved.

It took me a little while to find the plant based milk that I liked as most of the flavours were actually off putting to me.  However, after A LOT of testing I now mainly drink Koko coconut milk, which has the right taste and texture for me and is fortified with calcium, B vitamins, and vitamin D.

Whilst my decision on which type of milk I drink is mainly due to taste I have been wondering recently if my choice in milk is actually the most environmentally friendly one.  So, a little bit of research was needed.

There are, of course, environmental impacts for all the milks available to us and that's not just in the growing.  Something that I had never really thought about before was just how far some of the primary ingredients may have to travel to be processed and then end up in our stores.  However, even when you include things like this plant based milks are still less environmentally damaging than dairy milk. In fact there is a really interesting journal article by the University of Oxford about this called 'Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers'.  Definitely worth a read.

A little more digging online took me to Simple Happy Kitchen, which do great illustrated guides on information that is good to know when you’re going vegan.  They had done a post on some of the different types of milk available and the environmental impact they might have, with an illustration with the numbers.  In a boring table they look like this (I would definitely go check out the illustration though):

What this shows is that even the worst of the non-dairy offenders still has less of an environmental impact then dairy.  But this article didn’t include the milk that I drink the most of, coconut, and no matter how much research I’ve done I haven’t been able to find actual figures for this type of milk.  If you know them please let me know, I would be very interested to see how they tie up with the other milks.

So, what have I found.  Whilst Soy milk is probably the healthiest, containing the most macronutrients and fats, it has a very high negative environmental impact.  I'm mainly thinking of the large amounts of the Amazon rainforest that has been destroyed to grow this particular plant.  The production also needs quite a large quantity of pesticide.  This, of course, leeches into the surrounding environment, killing ecologically important insects.

Almond milk also has a fairly high environmental impact, mainly in the vast amount of water needed to grow this plant.  Most of the almond growers in the world are actually based in California, which has been experiencing extreme draughts over the past few years.  To keep growing the amount of produce needed even more strain needs to be placed on the surrounding environment to collect the water needed, which is not sustainable.  This milk also needs to be fortified to actually contain any health benefits to the consumer.

Rice milk, whilst not requiring the same amount of water as almond or dairy milk, still requires a fair amount when compared to the other plant based milks.  There also seems to be a risk of arsenic contamination of the rice field paddies, which obviously has health and environmental implications.  Similar to almond milk, rice milk needs to be fortified to make it nutritious to consumers.

Of the two milks I drink the most, Coconut and Oat milk (when there’s no coconut milk available), oat milk is the most nutritious, especially when it comes to fighting bad cholesterol.  In fact, coconut milk also needs to be fortified to make it beneficial to drink at all.  However, even though oat milk itself has pretty low carbon emissions, water use, and land use, coconut milk seems to have the lower environmental impact.  The farms that grow the coconut tend to be eco-friendly using very low amounts of pesticide and herbicide, and only a small amount of water is actually needed to grow it.  The coconut trees also absorb CO2, meaning that they can also play a part in the drawdown of carbon from the atmosphere (I’m guessing this is similar for the almond trees).

The biggest winner of the milks (though again I’m finding it difficult to find any actual figures, help would be much appreciated here) is a surprising one. It’s Hemp milk.  It doesn’t need a lot of water or pesticide, and the way it is grown is generally very environmentally friendly.  Unlike most of the other milks where the whole plant is harvested but only the seeds are used, with hemp the whole plant is used reducing the amount of waste.  The only downside for me is the taste.  I've tried to like it but for some reason the flavour reminds me of fish and I just can’t get my head around that.  


So all in all, after all that research, I’m pretty happy with the choice of milk I've already made.  It might not be the most nutritious without being fortified, but it is one of the most environmentally friendly milks out there.  My other go to is oat milk and that seems to score pretty highly as well.  I wish there was more hard evidence out there, but for now I’ll just have to trust in the information I’ve been given and make changes when more information becomes available.