Dairy Product Environmental Footprint

The Dairy PEF – also known as Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules or PEFCR – is a methodology for assessing the environmental footprint of different dairy products, considering a broad array of environmental criteria and covering the full life cycle of the product, from feeding the animal to washing your yoghurt spoon. It attests the European dairy sector’s continuous effort to improve its long-term environmental sustainability.

Updated Dairy PEFCR

A partial revision of the Dairy PEFCR was performed to update the validity of the methodology.

The updated version currently remains valid until 31 December 2025.

Please find the updated PEFCR documents below:

  1. Updated Dairy PEFCR
  2. Public review report of the PEFCR
  3. Mandatory company-specific data (LCI) to be collected
  4. Model of the Representative Product

Why the Dairy PEF?

A harmonised approach in the dairy the sector

It provides a harmonised approach from within the sector for measuring environmental footprint of products. The EU Commission and the sector are confident that it increases the credibility of environmental measurements compared to other unreliable methodologies

Identification of environmental hotspots

It is a assessment (LCA) based on a method that allows to identify the most significant environmental impacts linked to the production of certain dairy products, across a broad set of impact categories. It provides consistent, reliable, reproducible and verifiable results.

Minimising environmental impacts

The project represents a cooperative effort of all stakeholders along the whole chain. It builds on the sector’s several years’ experience of environmental improvement. It is a simple and workable tool for all actors involved and all external bodies interested.

Environmental performance 

The Dairy PEF contributes to the improvement of the performance of the overall sector. The methodology can be used as an internal tool for companies for monitoring the environmental improvements over time and managing impacts associated with the products concerned.

“The success of the Dairy PEF has been recognised by external evaluators and by the vote of the European Commission and the Member States in April 2018, that defined the Dairy PEF as the reference methodology in the dairy sector: see online.”