National Dairy Holdings Life Cycle Assessment

Business Challenge:

Due to customer requests for carbon-related information and coinciding with ongoing initiatives at the Dairy Management Institute, National Dairy Holdings (NDH) sought to understand the carbon footprint of a gallon jug of milk from dairy farm to distribution center.

Our Approach:

• ClearCarbon collected data from 17 NDH processing facilities and identified relevant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions sources for each step of the production process.
• Clear Carbon also calculated for enteric fermentation and manure management based on consultation with the Dairy Farmers of America.
• ClearCarbon collected data from contributing suppliers including resin, plastic and corrugate cases, plastic caps, vitamin D, labels, and jugs suppliers.
• ClearCarbon analyzed all data and calculated total emissions for all operations, as well as emissions per gallon of vitamin D fortified milk.

Value Created:

The resulting emissions breakdown allowed NDH to identify the greatest contributors to the gallon milk footprint, dairy farms. While packaging supplies such as jug resin, plastic crates, and caps were relatively minor emissions sources, NDH did discover that emissions are lower for a gallon of milk when using a corrugate case to transport the gallons as compared to plastic cases, which may lead to investigating transport options. At NDH’s own processing facilities, mobile fuel emissions are the greatest contributor (45%) to total emissions. These emissions are mainly due to NDH’s owned fleet, which transports gallons to distribution centers, leading to a second reason to further investigate transportation as part of the NDH supply chain. 

Project Staff

• J. Renee Morin
• Ricky Ashenfelter
• Katie Smith