We are plant-based universities,
a grassroots movement lobbying universities to transition to plant-based catering.

Join the campaign

We Won!

The Union Council passed our motion calling on Imperial to transition to 100% plant-based catering and committing the union to do the same!

The council voted 24 - 13 in favour of the motion.

The motion resolves a timeline of: 50% plant-based options in 2027/28, increasing by 10% each subsequent year, up to 100% plant-based.

PBU now has the endorsement of the student union, and it’s time to actually make change happen in the University.

How do we benefit?

Plant-based catering is affordable, healthy, and more accessible to dietary requirements. It’s also kinder to the climate and nature.

Want all the facts? Check out the FAQs.

What can I do?

We’re asking students to encourage their Union Councillors to vote for our motion at the next Council meeting and attend the Sustainability Forum, if they have questions.

We can use the Union’s support of 100% plant-based catering to pressure Imperial to transition their outlets.

Ready to help? Contact your councillors.

Our wins

15 student unions have already signed up to 100% plant-based catering.

PBU campfire

The Facts

Food systems account for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.1

Left unchecked, our diets alone will emit enough greenhouse gases to warm the earth well past 1.5 degrees and use up 75% of our carbon budget for 2.0 degrees.2

What we eat has a huge impact on our emissions.3 4 5 6

The impacts of climate change will be massive and widespread, and we need to act at speed & scale to reduce our emissions.7 8

So, we need to change what we eat to help save the planet. Plants are much more efficient than animals, as they are further down the food chain, and so emit much less carbon dioxide and methane and take up much less space9. In the UK, a plant-based diet could reduce the emissions of the average person’s diet by as much as 84%10, so the thing we must do to ensure our diets emit less is eat more plants and fewer animals.

By not transitioning to plant-based catering, we neglect ~25% of global emissions and condone the effects of climate change.

There are so many co-benefits to eating more plants, including benefits to health, biodiversity, and pollution. Our argument is strong from any of these perspectives, but we hope the above is especially clear. There really is no alternative but to act on this. Our diets must change, and our habits must change, and our cultures must change. It will not be easy, but plant-based catering is a good start.

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  1. Mbow, C., C. Rosenzweig, L.G. Barioni, T.G. Benton, M. Herrero, M. Krishnapillai, E. Liwenga, P. Pradhan, M.G. Rivera-Ferre, T. Sapkota, F.N. Tubiello, Y. Xu, 2019: Food Security. In: Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems [P.R. Shukla, J. Skea, E. Calvo Buendia, V. Masson-Delmotte, H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, P. Zhai, R. Slade, S. Connors, R. van Diemen, M. Ferrat, E. Haughey, S. Luz, S. Neogi, M. Pathak, J. Petzold, J. Portugal Pereira, P. Vyas, E. Huntley, K. Kissick, M. Belkacemi, J. Malley, (eds.)]. In press. ↩

  2. Clark, Michael A., Nina GG Domingo, Kimberly Colgan, Sumil K. Thakrar, David Tilman, John Lynch, Inês L. Azevedo, and Jason D. Hill. “Global food system emissions could preclude achieving the 1.5° and 2° C climate change targets.” Science, 370, no. 6517 (2020): 705-708. Available at: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food?insight=food-emissions-climate-targets#key-insights-on-the-environmental-impacts-of-food. ↩

  3. Hannah Ritchie (2020) - “You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local’ [Online Resource] ↩

  4. Poore, J., & Nemecek, T. (2018). Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science. - processed by Our World in Data. “Greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram” [dataset]. Poore, J., & Nemecek, T. (2018). Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science. [original data]. Available at: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/food-footprints. ↩

  5. Figure 5.7 in Bezner Kerr, R., T. Hasegawa, R. Lasco, I. Bhatt, D. Deryng, A. Farrell, H. Gurney-Smith, H. Ju, S. Lluch-Cota, F. Meza, G. Nelson, H. Neufeldt, and P. Thornton, 2022: Food, Fibre, and Other Ecosystem Products. In: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA, pp. 713-906, doi:10.1017/9781009325844.007. ↩

  6. Chloé Lewis, Sustainable Imperial (2021). UROP 2021 - Catering Carbon Footprint 2019 ↩

  7. Kotz, M., Levermann, A. & Wenz, L. The economic commitment of climate change. Nature 628, 551–557 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07219-0 ↩

  8. Byers, E. et al. AR6 scenarios database. Zenodo https://zenodo.org/records/7197970 (2022). ↩

  9. Hannah Ritchie (2021) - “If the world adopted a plant-based diet, we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets’ [Online Resource] ↩

  10. Kim, Brent; Santo, Raychel; Scatterday, Allysan; Fry, Jillian; Synk, Colleen; Cebron, Shannon; Mekonnen, Mesfin; Hoekstra, Arjen; de Pee, Saskia; Bloem, Martin; Neff, Roni; Nachman, Keeve (2019), “Data for: Country-specific dietary shifts to mitigate climate and water crises”, Mendeley Data, V3, doi: 10.17632/g8n8w8snmj.3 ↩