A burlap bag of roasted coffee beans. Photo by Tina Guina on Unsplash

Like >90% of the world1, I’m a caffeine user. I enjoy a cup or two in the morning, but I often find myself thinking about the cost of a cup.

I’m not talking about the $4 a day that everyone apparently is spending on coffees – that they could be saving instead to become a millionaire in… just 75 years2. I’m talking about the cost to the climate of getting that cup from the ground to your hand.

And you might be surprised by the answer. It’s not ditching the single serving k-cups. And it’s not even the plastic bags most beans and grounds are sold in.

I personally like buying coffee in paper bags. This is easy enough buying beans from the grocery store, but I’ve also been (slowly) putting together a list of Portland-area roasters that sell their coffee in paper. But packaging is really not the variable to try to fix if you want to have low-carbon coffee. (Though it is throwing another flattened-coffee-bag-sized grain of sand on the landfill problem.)

Transportation might seem like a big source of carbon from coffee, and it isn’t a trivial part. But, since most people live in countries where coffee is imported, there’s no big difference in the choice of coffee. Unless you consider – gasp! – not having coffee at all a choice.

No, the biggest contributor to coffee’s carbon footprint is how it’s grown. So for a person trying to have their morning fix, the largest difference you can make to lower your coffee’s GHG emissions is to make sure it is “shade grown”. Shade grown coffee is grown in the, well, shade of trees. This is similar to how coffee bushes grow naturally in their jungle ecosystems. There are some different types of shade-grown practices, but you don’t really need to worry about that – they are all better than clear-cutting, plantation style coffee growing.

Oh, and did I mention it helps with preserving biodiversity and lowering chemical pesticide and fertilizer use? Cuz it most definitely does.

So, next time you buy some coffee, reach for the shade-grown. You’ll have it made in the, um, penumbra.

  1. I’m getting this figure from Michael Pollan, but I’m not sure where he got it. And when I look up how many people consume caffeine around the world, I get links to a few studies that say it is the most widely used psychoactive substance. None of them seem to offer figures for what percentage of the world population are caffeineheads. ↩︎
  2. How long it takes to save $1mil with 5% return and 3% inflation, from this calculator. ↩︎