Doesn't almond milk use loads of water, worse than dairy?
Short answer: No. Almond milk is the thirstiest plant milk, yet dairy still uses far more water per litre, and beats it on land and emissions too.
Almond milk is the thirstiest plant milk and rice milk has the highest eutrophication, but across the board dairy beats every plant milk on all three measures.
Poore & Nemecek (2018), via Our World in Data
The objection
“Almond milk drinks the rivers dry, it takes a small lake to make a glass. Dairy’s the greener choice, honestly.”
The answer
Half right, and worth saying plainly: almonds are the thirstiest plant milk. They’re irrigation-hungry, mostly grown in drought-stressed California, and a critic who singles them out has a real point that this site won’t dodge.
But the comparison being made is the wrong one. Set almond milk against dairy, the thing it replaces, and dairy loses on every measure. Drawing on Poore & Nemecek’s global dataset, Our World in Data finds that cow’s milk uses around ten times as much land, produces roughly three times the greenhouse gas emissions, and uses two to twenty times as much freshwater as the plant alternatives, almond included [1]. The arithmetic is the same as everywhere else. You aren’t watering a crop, you’re watering everything a cow eats across its whole life, then keeping a fraction as milk.
And almond is the worst-case plant milk. If almonds’ irrigation genuinely bothers you, the move that follows is not back to dairy but across to oat or soy milk, which beat dairy comfortably on water, land and emissions [2]. Rice milk has the highest eutrophication of the plant options; oat and soy are the all-round cleanest.
So grant the almond its thirst. The greenest glass is still a plant one, just not necessarily the almond. Picking the dairy carton to “save water” gets the maths exactly backwards.