From picking to roasting to the electricity for grinding them and boiling the water, a carbon off setting company from Canada has recently calculated that 400-gram bag of french roast coffee from Nicaragua produces 1,807-grams of carbon dioxide, the equivalent to driving 170 km in a mid size car.

The final tally might not sound like much, but it quickly adds up if you do the math. A Coffee Association of Canada survey from 2003 suggested the average coffee drinker here consumes 2.6 cups a day. That means a year of drinking  Nicaraguan coffee with an average of each bag brewing about 50 cups, would produce about 34,000 grams of carbon dioxide, which is about the same as driving a mid-sized car for 170 kilometres. Two-thirds of that total is produced by consumers brewing the coffee at home and then throwing out the used grounds.

Every aspect of the coffee-making process was examined, including:

• Farming the beans in Nicaragua.
• Transporting them.
• Roasting and packaging them on Salt Spring Island.
• Distributing and selling the coffee.
• Brewing the coffee on a consumer’s kitchen counter.
• More often than not, tossing the used grounds in the garbage.

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The company who commissioned the study, Salt Spring Coffee, has been buying carbon offsets to make its operations carbon neutral since 2007, but that hasn’t included the farming of the beans or the footprint of consumers. On Tuesday, the company announced bags of its Nicaraguan French roast will also include offsets for the farming, picking and pre-processing in Nicaragua — which account for just two per cent of the total.

The company said that makes it the first carbon neutral coffee in Canada until the beans are sold to consumers.

For the remaining 64 per cent of the emissions, the company is urging its customers to reduce their footprint by making simple changes, such as ensuring they only use the amount of water they need and composting the used grounds instead of throwing them away.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2010/06/30/con-carbon-coffee.html#ixzz0tQLKLwyM

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Tags: Coffee And Politics, Coffee Facts, coffee news, Enviromentally Friendly, Farming