Adverts for oat drink company Oatly have been banned for making misleading environmental claims.
The two TV ads, a paid-for Facebook post, a paid-for Twitter post and two newspaper ads made various claims about Oatly’s environmental credentials, such as “Oatly generates 73% less CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) vs milk, calculated from grower to grocer”, “The dairy and meat industries emit more CO2e than all the world’s planes, trains, cars, boats etc combined”, and “Today, more than 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases are generated by the food industry, and meat and dairy account for more than half of that.”
One of the national press ads featured the claim: “Climate experts say cutting dairy and meat products from our diets is the single biggest lifestyle change we can make to reduce our environmental impact”, and “If everyone in the world adopted a vegan diet, it would reduce food’s annual greenhouse emissions by 6.6bn metric tons (a 49% reduction).”
