Number of the Day: 18 Coffee Trees per Person
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 09.24.08
20 Million -- That's how many families (about 60 to 80 million people) depend on coffee for their income. After oil, coffee is the second largest traded commodity in the world.
100 -- That's how many coffee beans it takes to make one cup of coffee on average.
4,000 -- One coffee tree yields about 4,000 beans per year on average.
18 -- If you drink 2 cups of coffee a day, you will need 18 coffee trees devoted just to you. And it takes 5 years before a tree is fully mature and productive.
A coffee farm in Costa Rica.
We strongly encourage you to check out our How to Green Your Coffee & Tea guide for tips on how to make your dark beverage addiction greener.
But really, the best way to go green is to drink more tap water. Not as fun, but once you get over withdrawal, it's not that bad!
Source of the stats: EcoNews
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Awesome! My two-cup-per-day habit is keeping at least one farmer and 18 CO2 eating trees alive.
Go coffee!
"Awesome! My two-cup-per-day habit is keeping at least one farmer and 18 CO2 eating trees alive.
Go coffee!"
I'm afraid it's not quite that simple.
If they burned down rainforest to plant the coffee farm, that's a negative for CO2 and biodiversity.
And shipping and processing coffee all over the world takes energy too.
So coffee is the next target of wannabe do gooders?? I will say it again ....CRYBABIES.......
I'm with Brennan. Buy Fair Trade, shade-grown/organic and you are supporting individual farmers in the developing world who are looking out for the environment. Not all coffee producers "burn down rainforests" to plant coffee.
MGR, That cutting down the rain forest thing is easy to solve. by only buying shade grown beans. They grow the coffee trees under the canopy and they are not nearly as acidic. You can get them in a lot of places like the Audubon Society website.
or you could grow your own like i do..... ;)
It's coffee's own fault for being so damn good.
Too bad the photo is of a sun coffee farm -- exactly what you need to avoid because tropical forest was cut down to plant those coffee trees. See the single tree in the middle? Because there is no legal definition of "shade" coffee, Costa Rica allows very minimal use of shade trees to be called shade coffee. Look for Smithsonian Bird-Friendly or Rainforest Alliance certified coffees, which use environmental criteria.
I don't see where the "100 bean" average is coming from. I don't have my coffee grinder in front of me, but I recall roughly 20 beans per cup, maybe 30.
I'm sorry, but targeting coffee is just too far for environmentalists to go. There are several ways to help keep jobs and support the workers of coffee, such as buying Capulin coffee, which is not floated and the quality is not degraded like the big companies, while providing more jobs for the locals. If you want to know more about the environmental and social effects of coffee, look at this podcast episode, which I just listened to last week.
I'm with Jordan. I can't see how 100 beans are used per cup. Maybe they are averaging out waste? It would be nice if EcoNews had their sources listed, but I couldn't see any.
I measure one tbsp beans per cup for grinding then brewing- in a quick experiment, I just averaged 23 beans per cup. That would be a pretty large cup of coffee to use 100 beans.