Find and record a compatible emissions factor
Before calculating, record the factor’s publisher, publication year, transport mode, geographic coverage, units, and included activities. Match those details to your shipment. Convert the factor into the units requested by the form rather than copying an unrelated per-vehicle or per-passenger figure.
Keep the same system boundary when comparing scenarios. Transport-only results do not automatically include farming, processing, packaging, storage, or cooking. A longer route alone does not establish a larger whole-food footprint. The existing example factor is an entered illustration, not a recommended default for every shipment.
This food miles calculator estimates the emissions from shipping food over one transport leg when you know the shipment mass, route distance, and an emissions factor appropriate to that leg. It reports transport work in tonne-kilometres and a transport-only emissions scenario in kg CO₂e.
Set up a traceable transport scenario
Enter shipment mass in kilograms, distance in kilometres, and a nonnegative factor in kg CO₂e per tonne-kilometre. The factor is not supplied: record its transport mode, geography, year, system boundary, and source. Also record the factor version and an uncertainty or sensitivity range. These details keep two runs comparable and make a later update auditable.
The supported method is:
tonne-kilometres = shipment mass (kg) / 1,000 × distance (km)
transport emissions (kg CO₂e) = tonne-kilometres × factor (kg CO₂e/t-km)
The result uses the entered values without intermediate rounding, then displays both outputs to one decimal place. Mass, distance, and factor must be finite and nonnegative; the source, provenance, and uncertainty fields are required.
Example: shipment food miles
For a 500 kg shipment travelling 1,000 km, mass is 500 / 1,000 = 0.5 t. Transport work is 0.5 × 1,000 = 500 t-km. With an entered factor of 0.062 kg CO₂e/t-km, emissions are 500 × 0.062 = 31 kg CO₂e, displayed as 31.0 kg CO₂e alongside 500.0 t-km.
Audit a route leg by leg
For a journey involving more than one mode, make one run per leg rather than assigning one factor to the entire distance. In a simple audit table, record leg, shipped mass, distance, factor, factor source/version, and result. Add leg results only when their CO₂e definitions and boundaries are compatible. This preserves which change came from distance, load, or factor instead of hiding all three in one total.
To test factor uncertainty, keep mass and distance fixed and rerun the documented lower and upper factor values. The resulting span is a sensitivity range, not a confidence interval.
Boundary and next step
This estimate excludes food production, packaging, refrigeration or storage energy, retail, cooking, waste, and any transport leg you omit. It is not a product footprint, inventory, certification, or offset quantity. For lifecycle emissions of the food itself, use the Meat Footprint Calculator; for the packaging leg this estimate excludes, the Plastic Footprint Calculator annualizes item mass. Other transport modes are covered by the Flight Emissions Calculator. Distance should represent the route covered by the selected mode, while the factor must use the same tonne-kilometre basis.
Next, verify the factor edition and boundary against its original dataset, then save each leg’s inputs and result so the scenario can be reproduced when distances or factors change.
Record the transport scenario
Keep the food quantity, travel distance, and transport assumption together when comparing supply options. Use a second run for a changed distance and another for a changed transport basis. The comparison concerns the entered transport scenario and should not silently be expanded into a complete assessment of how the food was produced.
Sources
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FAO, “Livestock and the Environment” — current web edition; lifecycle and environmental-context overview, accessed 2026-07-09. Route-specific boundary: context and terminology only; it does not supply an entered coefficient, uncertainty, recommendation, or approval.
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Greenhouse Gas Reporting Conversion Factors 2024 — UK government GHG conversion-factor methodology, including freight factors expressed per tonne-kilometre; supports the page’s requirement that the entered factor share the same tonne-kilometre basis, mode, geography, and year.
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U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “Overview of Greenhouse Gases” — CO2-equivalent (CO2e) greenhouse-gas context for the kg CO2e readout; no entered coefficient comes from this source.