Thursday 17 June 2010

Milk with your icecap?

OK, it's not as bad as driving an SUV or flying off for long weekends, but your coffee habit is killing polar bears:

The carbon footprint of a cup of tea or coffee:
21g CO2e: black tea or coffee, boiling only the water you need 
53g CO2e: white tea or coffee, boiling only the water you need 
71g CO2e: white tea or coffee, boiling double the water you need 
235g CO2e: a large cappuccino 
340g CO2e: a large latte


Some of my colleagues consumer loads of expensive lattes through the day. What damage do they cause over a year?
Three large lattes per day, by contrast, and you're looking at almost twenty times as much carbon, equivalent to flying half way across Europe.
It's mostly the milk - which I gave up a while back, though not for environmental reasons. Every pint you waste drinking it could have made cheese!



I also gave up coffee - several a day at work meant I was completely spaced out in the morning, then felt ill and exhausted in the afternoon - more than once I crawled under the desk for a little snooze. I really hurt my head on the underside of the desk, waking up in a hurry when someone walked in during last summer. 

Now I mostly drink mint tea. At the moment, it's as environmentally friendly as possible: I use mint leaves torn from my own plant. 

1 comment:

Benjamin Judge said...

You are falling into old habits here Vole. ie

a) what does a Vole not do?
b) is is bad for the environment?
c) Let's have a go at everyone else for doing it

Show us the figures for book production. At least we drink the bloody coffee not just order it from Amazon or wherever, have it shipped across the country (presumably not by bike) and then just put it on the pile with the other ten books that arrived that day.

If everyone on earth bought books at the same rate as you there would be no forests and the polar bears would have died out twenty years ago. You, like it or not, are a capitalist monster.