Ah, the smell of freshly made coffee in the morning… The reassuring drip of the coffee maker as it roasts our morning brew. The warmth of a coffee shop on a cold winter’s day.
But at what cost?
Now, I don’t mean the three to five dollars you fork out for a fancy single-origin latte with whipped cream and a flavor shot. And though there is a very real human cost of your coffee – (ask yourself – where did these beans come from? Who planted and tended to and harvested from them? Who wiped the sweat off their brow in a less developed, poorer nation to bring you your favored blend? And think about the statistic that for every 100 pounds of coffee cherries, you get only 20 pounds of coffee beans) – we won’t go into that much.
This is a sustainability course, and as such, I’d like you to consider the astounding impacts of your cup of coffee. It, of course, varies, depending on whether it’s free trade, what kind of container it is served to you in, whether you recycle your cup, and other such variables. Coffee is a global commodity that often is consumed in disposable cups, which introduce plastics and polyethylene into the environment when they are sent to the landfill.
You can read the full article from the Independent here, but I would like to highlight just one infographic embedded in the text:
There’s more bad news for everyone who enjoys a little caffeinated pick-me-up in the morning: According to Dr. Sarada Krishnan in a 2017 paper on the sustainability of coffee, “Some of the threats contributing to the erosion of coffee genetic diversity include human population pressures, volatile coffee markets, and global climate change.”
That’s right – overpopulation and anthropogenic climate change are both factors which impact your cuppa. Coffee plants are, on the whole, losing genetic diversity.
All in all, it’s enough to make you think twice before you buy a hot, steaming cup of Joe.
The way you wrote this post caught my eye, because it brought to mind a small pattern I noticed a few years ago: it seems that every single article that dons a clickbait-esque title along the lines of “45 Things You Need To Stop Spending On So You Can Buy Yeezys and Afford Spotify Premium,” seems to be accompanied by a stock photo of a latte in a paper cup. You can’t utter the words “personal finance” without someone going on an over-eager rant about the life-changing power of considering the cost of stopping by a deli or cafe to pick up a cup of coffee on our way to work.
We’re in Baruch, so it’s not necessary to insert a reminder of how many monthly app subscriptions we could afford if we stop doling out 5 bucks every morning for our caffeine-fix – and we’re not even going to get into the heresy that is spending hard-earned money on decaf.
The biggest “cost ” of our coffee-buying habits may not be the one that shrinks our checkings accounts – and is certainly not one that is the subject of a plethora of Buzzfeed articles. If an individual purchases a disposable cup every day, this creates about 23 pounds of waste per year – more weight than we’ll lose if we forego the double-chocolate-chip Frappucinos. Though they are made largely of paper, disposable coffee cups are lined with plastic polyethylene, which is tightly bonded to the paper making the cups waterproof and therefore able to contain liquid. And, because coffee cups are tainted with beverages, they cannot be accepted by a majority of paper recycling plants.
According to a study by Starbucks, each paper cup manufactured is responsible for 0.24 pounds of CO2 emissions, and yet less than 1% of customers bring their own reusable cups to buy beverages at the coffee chain – despite the incentive of a 10% discount. While we certainly oughtn’t forget the impact our daily doses of caffeine have on our bank accounts, more of us ought to look beyond personal finance, and consider that the most damage caused by our cappuccinos might be the thinning stacks of bills in our wallets, but instead the thinning ozone layer of our atmosphere.