opinion: carbon calculators

This is the start of a weekly series exploring the areas that carbon calculators don’t consider.

Each and everyone of us at some point in our movement towards being green has computed their carbon footprint using some online carbon calculator. Some of us were excited exclaiming “I am only three Earths!” And, if you think about that statement, you see the ridiculousness.

However, there is a problem with those calculators. They do not get to the root of the eco-footprint issues. They are a racket to have us believe we are doing a good job, therefore, not altering our behaviors, or they highlight areas that we can adjust which are, in reality, not worth the time nor the effort. How would reducing the amount of trips I take by plane affect the 49,000 flights per day? If I change every lightbulb to a CFL, would that counter the commercial building that has their lights on, all day and night?

In truth, all they have really done has created a sales push for carbon offsets. An industry which allows you to continue being wasteful, guilt-free, because you have put a wad of cash in someone else’s pocket to “fix” it all.

There is a list of the things that those calculators don’t ask, thereby eliminating them from their algorithm. These are the things that are sometimes the meat of the matter, so to speak. By altering these things, you could affect your true footprint in ways unimaginable and truly make our planet sustainable.

COFFEE

Good Morning! Did you go grab a cup of coffee this morning? Did you get it from your local coffee stop? It’s not mentioned in the traditional calculators but if you answered yes, you increased your carbon footprint.

Let’s take a deeper look at that morning cup of coffee. Did you know that coffee is the second most traded commodity after oil. Changing how you drink coffee is one of the easiest things you can do to change the environment. (THE easiest is coming up…!)

a.) Land is needed. You have the land to grow the coffee beans. The land needed for processing and distribution operations. The land for corporate management, and other affiliates like advertisers, cup producers, and napkin makers. The individual stores. The forest that was needed to make all the paper products that your coffee came in. And, if we are talking about forests, the additional forest land is needed to absord the resulting CO2 from all the energy needed to harvest, process and ship the coffee. There is the land needed to make all the machinery used. The land to make the chemicals used in pesticides and fertilizers. And so on, and so on.

b.) Water. Globally it requires 140 billion cubic meters of water per year to be able to drink coffee and tea. That’s 140 TRILLION liters of water. It is also the equivalent to 880 BILLION barrels of oil.

c.) Other utilities. All that land mentioned above, at least the building part of it, has to have utilities keeping it functioning. This means electricity and water that is supplied to each location for an indeterminate amount of time. What is the footprint of each employee; do they drive to work and in what kind of car. Did they have the air conditioning running because it was a sweltering 80 degree day?

d.) Waste generated. One Starbucks can generate 40,000 cups of coffee per month. There are roughly 14,000 Starbucks internationally. That is the potential of 560 Billion paper cups, per month, finding their way to our landfills. And that is just one coffee chain.

e.) Was your coffee shade grown or fair trade? Was it purchased from a farm that is as close to your hometown as possible? If you just ordered the coffee at the counter without any specifications… it probably wasn’t. And, by the way, even if you were to ask for your coffee to be made with a fair trade blend, they couldn’t and wouldn’t honor your request.

Global climate change presents a very large problem for coffee growers. Coffee is a fragile plant requiring a specific climate in which to thrive; even a slight change of temperature or rain can decrease coffee yields, quality or even threaten an entire country’s crop. And, when large, native forests are cut down to provide more area for sun-grown coffee, this deforestation causes carbon emissions and destroys natural carbon sinks decreasing our ability to stop climate change.

I hope it was a very, VERY good cup of joe.

Starbucks: an update

A few weeks ago, I posted about a big expose that Starbucks wastes millions of gallons of water because of some stupid policy. Go HERE for the first story.

Well, YAY! Good news to be told. They changed their policy!!

You can go HERE for the announcement.

could I have a latte and a chance at saving my planet?

Yep. It’s easy. Stop going to Starbucks.

Case and point… did you know it is their policy to have a sink with running water on AT ALL TIMES??? Well, you do know. Go HERE.

“The giant coffee chain has a policy of keeping a tap running non-stop at all its 10,000 outlets worldwide, wasting 23.4 MILLION litres a day. That would provide enough daily water for the entire two million-strong population of drought-hit Namibia in Africa or fill an Olympic pool every 83 minutes.”

Maybe you should consider going somewhere a wee bit more eco-friendly.

Or better yet… YAY! for this idea… instead of getting your coffee drinks at an average of $35 a week, but a pound of beans at $12, which lasts about two weeks, and make your coffee AT HOME. This way you can be assured you are buying fair trade coffee, using the minimum of water required, not supporting a store that creates waste, runs water and electricity, etc., etc., etc.