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Sustainability/environmental Tea

Talking about coffee and climate change

coffee cake Muni
Coffee and chocolate, both of which may be badly affected by climate change.

Last week the Royal Meteorological Society hosted an afternoon of talks and discussion titled “Avoiding Myth, Mayhem and Myopia: the challenge of climate science communication”. The meeting coincided with a social media campaign “#showthelove” which aimed to highlight something that you fear is at risk because of climate change. As coffee is definitely one of those things that is at risk (and indeed is already being affected by climate change), I went along to the discussion to see what is already being done to communicate climate science and also, what we can do as science communicators.

Although I do not research climate science (my research involves superconductors), there are many links between coffee and the climate: clouds of steam, turbulent movement, periodic waves in the cup and of course the greenhouse effect. Additionally, the risks that coffee faces from the effects of climate change are dire. Summarised in the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR5), the risks to coffee are threefold, 1) from a warming climate 2) from more extreme weather events, 3) from pests that have increased due to (1) and (2).

Currently about 27million acres of the Earth’s land is used to cultivate coffee, most of which is grown by small scale farmers. The effects of warming mean that this area is going to decrease substantially. For us consumers this is going to mean a dent in our pockets but for the estimated 120 million people worldwide who depend on coffee growing for their livelihood, it is likely to be catastrophic.

room full of scientists and others, RMetS meeting, discussion time
A good crowd meant a lively discussion at “Avoiding Myth, Mayhem and Myopia”. What should we communicate about climate science and how?

The odd weather patterns that are going to be more common are also going to affect the coffee yield. Severe droughts are likely to happen more frequently (this year’s drought in Brazil has actually prompted the government there to consider importing (robusta) coffee beans). Moreover the combination of higher temperatures and greater rainfall that has been seen recently in Central America has ‘helped’ outbreaks of coffee rust while the berry borer beetle is also benefitting from the warmer climate worldwide (at the expense of the coffee crop).

Among climate scientists, the issues are clear (for the world rather than just for coffee). Climate change is already happening and it is caused by human activity in the form of greenhouse gas emissions. The problems are how to communicate this knowledge both to policy makers and industry and to the public so that we, as a society, can do something about it. What do each of these groups want to know and how best to reach them? There were discussions at the meeting about how to engage with politicians and to ensure that the message is properly transmitted so as to translate into action but for me (as a non-climate-scientist who drinks a lot of coffee), the interesting bit was about communicating with the public. In this sense it was great to see that the meeting had attracted a diverse audience with both Oxfam and the Green Party represented. Two questions dominated here: How is climate change affecting us now (/will affect us in the future)? And, what can we each do about it?

Bob Ward, Obama quote, climate change
The last generation: Bob Ward emphasising the urgent need for scientists to communicate effectively.

In terms of the second question, it seemed agreed that the best thing that we each can do is to reduce our carbon footprint. A concern echoed by the Society’s recent communiqué written with other professional bodies (that you can read here). Simple things like driving less or buying more efficient washing machines (or other household appliances when they need to be replaced) can make a difference. Of course, if you wanted to, you can have a go at calculating your carbon footprint using tools such as this guide by David MacKay (it is a lot easier than it may seem at first glance). It was this aspect of what ‘we’ can do that some audience members (including a Green Party representative) thought was a key thing that scientists working with the Royal Meteorological Society needed to communicate. Expect to hear far more about how you can make a difference.

In general, it seemed that there was a clear feeling that the scientists there wanted to communicate climate science and the science of climate change more insistently and more clearly. Indeed there was a rallying call for us all to increase our science communication by Bob Ward (the Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute of the London School of Economics). But how should scientists communicate? Is there an intrinsic conflict between the language typically used by scientists and the urgency of the message? Should climate scientists use emotion in their discussions about climate change and what about issues of trust? All these are too much for this piece and so I shall leave those questions until next week, for now perhaps, it would be worth asking people who read this to suggest something that they are doing to reduce their carbon footprint, it doesn’t have to be much and it doesn’t need to be about coffee (though it would be nice if there were some coffee ideas) but please do share your ideas for reducing your carbon footprint, it is likely that they will be useful for others too.

Next week: Do we speak the same language? Is scientific language a help or a hindrance when it comes to communicating climate change?

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Coffee review General Observations slow Sustainability/environmental Tea

Environmentalism inside and out at Farmstand, Covent Garden

Farmstand Drury Lane
Farmstand on Drury Lane

How can we live sustainably, buying locally, being mindful of our ecological footprint and still drink coffee? A recent trip to Farmstand on Drury Lane revealed a café conscious of its environmental responsibilities, somewhere that is trying to help us to make a difference while still enjoying good food and great coffee. Is it possible for us to have our coffee and drink it? The people behind Farmstand certainly seem to think so.

The bare brick walls inside the spacious Farmstand have a certain rustic charm that serves to emphasise the environmental concerns of the café. A focus on local, free range meat and GM free vegetables means that this is definitely a place to be considered when looking for a lunch spot (though on this occasion, we only tried the coffee). Coffee is obviously not locally grown but is roasted by Workshop which is, relatively speaking, just down the road. Tea meanwhile comes from Postcard teas, just up the street. Water is complementary and is provided on tap so as to reduce plastic waste. The service was friendly and with such a bright and airy feel it is a very pleasant space to enjoy an Americano (though I imagine it is fairly crowded at lunchtimes). However, the Americano was served in a take-away cup (when I specified I was staying in). After a bit of digging on their website, I discovered that they use compostable and/or recyclable packaging sourced from London Bio Packaging. However, as it is not easy to either recycle nor to compost cups in regular waste collection (including recycling collections), it would be interesting to know details of how they dispose of their cups so as to know how they reconcile this with the otherwise careful environmental policy.

Interior vertical gardening
Green wall inside Farmstand

As you enter the café, there is a staircase on the left hand side. Potted plants are fixed to the railings making what seems to be almost a miniature green wall. A great way to get houseplants into a small space, this seemed a small scale example of the green walls that are starting to pop up around our cities. Green walls are vertical gardens. They can be grown either with climbing plants or with a second structure on the wall that supports the hundreds of plants. Along with an aesthetic appeal (certainly true of the structure at Farmstand), these green walls have environmental benefits too.

A big environmental problem in cities is particulate pollution from exhausts. Specifically, particulate matter that is less than 10 μm diameter (think Turkish coffee grind) can irritate the lungs and cause health problems for the city’s inhabitants. Particulates less than 2.5 μm diameter are even more dangerous to health. Worldwide, in 2012, 3.7 million early deaths were associated with poor air quality. In London, a 2010 study showed that approximately 4000 deaths per year were the result of exhaust fumes. Which brings us to the first reason that green walls in cities may be such a good thing: Plants adsorb the pollutants.

Green wall Singapore
A green wall at the Ocean Financial Centre in Singapore, Image shared under cc license (attrib. share alike) by smuconlaw.

Over a three month period, a study by Imperial College showed that a single green wall on Edgware Road tube station had removed 515 g of particulate matter from the atmosphere. Using a mix of plants on the wall was found to increase the air turbulence around the wall and so increase the adsorption of the pollutants. Of course, different plants performed differently (in terms of their ability to remove particulate matter from the air). One of the plants on the wall (Convolvulus cneorum) could take out up to 2.73±0.16 g/m² of particulate matter*. On the other hand, another plant on the wall (Hedera helix) took out much less, removing only 0.28±0.02 g/m². However, we know Hedera helix by another name: Ivy. And ivy plants can produce a lot of foliage per plant very quickly. Convolvulus cneorum on the other hand, is a small plant with small leaves. While its efficiency could be very high, the amount of pollution it can remove may not be as great as an ivy plant, purely as a consequence of its leaf size.

Which brings us to questions of aesthetics and practicality. The wall at Edgware Road is planted with many different types of plant in order to produce an effect that reduces pollution while also being good to look at. Similar walls have sprouted up all over the world. However, for short term projects that require a large amount of foliage quickly, planting ivy can be a good option as a pollutant remover. Some of the temporary structures built along Park Lane for the Crossrail project are now covered with ivy. Although I had initially thought that this was due to a lack of weeding, it turns out that this is part of a step towards pollution reduction in our cities (modelling data has indicated that these green walls can reduce the local particulate pollution by 10-20% depending on the geometry of the wall and the plant species growing).

A small step perhaps, but one that is definitely in the right direction. The green wall at Farmstand could therefore be said to illustrate the idea that if we are to make a difference to our external world, we must start by reforming our own interior one. We need to make green walls not green wash and we can start by paying attention to what we plant inside and out.

Farmstand is at 42 Drury Lane, WC2B 5AJ

*The study looked at particulate matter between 2.5 µm and 10µm diameter (i.e. PM(2.5)-PM(10)).

 

 

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Coffee Roasters Sustainability/environmental Uncategorized

Plastic, coffee and ethical consumerism

“[W]hile 30% of UK consumers claimed to espouse ethical standards only 3% of purchases examined reflected those standards”∗.

Earth from space, South America, coffee
The Blue Marble, Credit, NASA: Image created by Reto Stockli with the help of Alan Nelson, under the leadership of Fritz Hasler

Most of us are aware of the growing number of environmental problems facing our planet and many of us want to do something. The question is what? Take the packaging that we use for freshly-roasted coffee. It often comes in metallised plastic bags with aroma valves on the front. Is this packaging good for the environment, or for our coffee?

Many factors will influence our decisions as consumers. Even our ‘ethical’ decisions can be based on different arguments. One factor though is, hopefully, the insights gained from scientific studies on the environmental effects of different types of packaging. Today’s Daily Grind examines some of this science.

Types of coffee packaging available

When you order coffee from a roaster, or buy it at a supermarket, mostly it will arrive in a metallised plastic bag. Some companies will supply coffee in compostable ‘plastic’ packaging, or paper, but most bags are still made from ordinary plastic. Some, larger, coffee roasters supply their coffee in cans. Although these are 100% recyclable, the increased weight compared to plastic packaging and the limited re-usability of the cans mean that plastic packaging can be more environmentally friendly than canned coffee. This article is therefore only going to consider smaller roasters and the plastic vs paper debate.

The problems of packaging

It is helpful to clarify the environmental concerns with respect to packaging. For the case of paper vs plastic, three major areas of concern are:

  • Depletion of a limited resource, recycling and re-usability.
  • Carbon dioxide emissions – in the manufacture and transportation of packaging.
  • Degradability – in both landfill and as litter.

Recycling and the Limited Resource problem

air valve, plastic, environmental coffee packaging
Disposable products make up about 37% of plastics produced‡. Are we wasting limited supplies by wanting our coffee as fresh as possible?

Paper comes from wood but plastics are generally a by-product of the petroleum industry (5% of petroleum in the US is used to produce plastics). Perhaps you will say that not all plastics are made from petroleum by-products. It is true. “Compostable” plastics are typically manufactured from starch based products (corn etc). However other bio-degradable plastics are petroleum based. “Oxo-biodegradable” plastic is ‘ordinary’ plastic with a small amount of catalyst added to it during manufacture. The catalyst causes the plastic to break down more quickly than the conventional plastic without the additive. Typically oxo-biodegradable plastic will be manufactured to degrade after 18 months compared with many years for ‘ordinary’ plastic.

Both compostable and oxo-biodegradable plastic are sometimes called ‘biodegradable’, but there are crucial differences between the two. For the sake of this article, I’ll be comparing ‘ordinary’ plastic with ‘compostable’ plastic (conforming to EN 13432) and oxo-biodegradable plastic (regulation ASTM D6954).

So the first part of the question would be to ask if the coffee packaging is made from recycled material. Paper can clearly be made from recycled material as can ordinary plastic and oxo-biodegradable plastic. Compostable plastic cannot be recycled and so cannot have been made from recycled material.

The second part of the question is whether you can recycle the packaging after using it. Again, paper packaging can obviously be recycled (provided it is not lined with plastic). Although both ordinary and oxo-biodegradable plastic can, in principle, be recycled, the multilayered and metallised design of the coffee bag means that it is not normally recyclable. Some coffee roasters however have started using specially designed plastic packaging that can be recycled in normal recycling centers. It would be great if more followed suit.

Two questions for your coffee supplier: Are the bags used to package the coffee made from recycled material and are they recyclable?

Greenhouse Gas emissions and energy costs

paper bag roasted coffee
Is a paper bag necessarily better for the environment?

Perhaps it is greenhouse gas emissions that concern you and so want to choose an environmentally sound packaging in terms of its CO2 emissions? Paper or plastic? You may be surprised. The environmental cost of a packaging type as measured by its CO2 emissions depends mostly on the energy that is required to manufacture it and the energy that is required to transport the packaging material to the point at which it is used (ie. the delivery of the bags to the roaster).

A few years ago, the Environment Agency performed a lifecycle analysis of different types of shopping bags (plastic, paper, cloth). Plastic bags are typically significantly lighter than the heavier paper bags. So, in addition to the cost of making the bags, it is going to require more energy to transport paper bags to the point of use. The report calculated that the manufacture and transportation of paper bags consumed so much more energy than plastic bags, that paper bags had to be re-used 4 times in order to have the same CO2 emissions as an ordinary supermarket plastic bag, re-used as a bin liner. The situation for a cloth bag was even worse.

Although the plastic used for coffee packaging is much heavier than a standard supermarket shopping bag, the analysis suggests that if your concern is CO2, paper is not necessarily better than plastic. It depends on how you are going to re-use the bags before you eventually recycle them.

Litter and Degradability

I hope that no one is deliberately discarding their used coffee packets onto the street or onto the beach! But litter and bio-degradability are big issues for plastic based packaging materials, particularly at sea. There are horrific stories about marine animals being starved due to consuming plastic or being drowned because they are entangled in it. Paper will degrade very quickly and so clearly does not suffer from the same problems as the plastic packaging in this topic. However, as mentioned above, not all plastic is the same. As well as ordinary plastic, your coffee could come roasted and packaged in a degradable plastic, either compostable or oxo-biodegradable.

sea no litter
There is a big problem with plastic litter ending up in the oceans

The name ‘compostable plastic’ (EN13432) is, to me, a bit disingenuous. It suggests that it breaks down in a composting facility such as my worm bin. But the standard EN13432 does not refer to such home-composting at all. For a plastic to be deemed compostable it has to break down under industrial composting conditions (ie. it is held at 58 C for the period of its degradation). Not all countries/councils offer such facilities for their waste disposal and so a compostable plastic sent to landfill offers little advantage over ‘ordinary’ plastic. However, in the marine environment it has been shown that the compostable plastic bag did degrade quickly relative to ordinary plastic bags‡.

Oxo-biodegradable plastic on the other hand works very differently. At the time of its manufacture, metal-salt catalysts are added to the plastic that determine how long the plastic survives before it breaks down. As long as it is exposed to light and oxygen, the oxo-biodegradable plastic will break down after, typically, 18 months (though the usable time can be made longer than this). Recent studies have shown that it is safe to recycle oxo-biodegradable plastic together with conventional plastic recycling†. Provided that the bag does not get covered in algae, an oxo-biodegradable plastic will break down after 18 months (if that was the time specified at manufacture) whether it is on land or on sea.

Therefore if litter is what you are worried about, you have to ask where you think that the plastics are going to end up and whether you want to be able to recycle them or just re-use them.

So what should you do?

There’s no point me answering this question for you. Ultimately I do not know your individual circumstances and concerns, nor how you are buying and consuming your coffee. Moreover, these considerations have been solely based on some of the environmental problems associated with different packaging. Coffee consumption has other factors, such as the major issue of how the coffee tastes. Earlier this year, Roasting House conducted an experiment to blind-taste the coffee after it had been stored in different types of packaging. You can find the results of that interesting study here.

a take away cup
The next problem. What should we do about take-away cups?

Personally, my concerns are principally the greenhouse gas emissions and the litter/degradability problem. I also buy coffee that is delivered to me very soon after it has been roasted. So I tend to favour packaging that uses unbleached, recycled paper. There is a caveat though. The CO2 emissions caused by paper manufacture and transportation means that I need to find a way to re-use the bags as often as possible before recycling/composting. Fortunately, I think there is a great use for old paper coffee bags: They are the perfect size for carrying loose vegetables or uncooked fish/meat products in supermarkets (rather than use the plastic bags that can be supplied for these products). Each paper coffee bag can be reused multiple times before it finally becomes unusable.

If I were drinking coffee that wasn’t quite so freshly roasted, I would be in favour of using oxo-biodegradable plastic (preferably from recycled material). I do not currently have an opinion on compostable (EN13432) plastic. The results of the degradation of compostable plastic in a marine environment were encouraging and if it starts to become genuinely compostable (as I understand the word in terms of home composting) it would definitely be a type of packaging to consider.

You may come to different conclusions, if you do so, please do let me know what you think in the comments section below. In the meantime, a map of coffee roasters who are trying to improve the environmental footprint of their packaging in a variety of ways can be found here.

 

I am grateful for discussions with Oh Ying Ying of Miracle Spectrum Sdn Bhd who helped me to navigate the minefield of environmental plastics. There is much more to write about plastics, the environment, litter & the Paris meeting, the whole issue of take-away cups for example!

∗ Yeow et al., “Bags for life: the embedding of ethical consumerism” J. Business Ethics, 125, 87 (2014)

‡ O’Brine et al., “Degradation of plastic carrier bags in the marine environment”, Marine Pollution Bulletin, 60, 2279 (2010)

† A report by the Transfer Centre für Kunststofftecknik GmbH (“TCKT”) dated 12 November 2013 on behalf of European Plastic Converters (EuPC), Roediger Agencies.

ª Plastics and the Environment, Ed. AL Andrady, Wiley-Interscience Publications, 2003