Sustainable Coffee: Our #1 problem isn't paper cups 

Bravo on highlighting large environmental costs of dairy. When one also considers the animal cruelty involved, it becomes defenseless to continue its usage

What an insightful video! In the last graph you show the carbon footprint of cultivation v trasnportation v consumption, interesting perspective! Do you have a breakdown of consumption ?

I agree with it, the video seems all those facts presented by you should gain more popularity, and I think this type of service should become more appreciated by society in the future. However, if you have a higher portion of ''coffee to go'' sales let's say 60/40. And you sell 1000 cups per month. This makes 600 single-use (plastic or paper) cups per month or 7200 cups per year. The cups do not end up in the waste stream of the cafe tough but it ends up in public bins. This becomes a public problem and the costs for cleaning these cups are paid by taxpayers. In fact, the ''shadow-cost method'' shows that certainly one paper cup can cost 3 or 4 cents, but the cost to recycle it might end up to 25 or 35 cents. Surely, the cups can be incinerated but this will demand a lot of paper cups ''more deforestation'' in the future, in order for us to enjoy our coffee. In addition, single-use plastic cups are producing a lot of micro-plastics which can hardly be captured and often ends up in the oceans or in the air. Because of this a lot of countries are planning to ban single-use plastic cups, especially in the EU. Certainly, the coffee cups are not the biggest cost for cafeterias, but in an open-world with free unlimited access to coffee, especially with those low prices, I think it becomes a problem for governments, in terms of recycling the impact of coffee drinking culture. I am doing research on the topic, btw looking for professional advice, I think I had to make the comment more intriguing so hopefully, we can contact each other Adam. Even if not keep the good work and give us more information about sustainable coffee drinking culture. Thank you for your efforts and for this good analysis!

Amazing video Adam 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

This is actually very interesting! I'm most definitely going to try to reduce my milk consumption with coffee! On another note, going back to that tiny sliver of the pie that we consumers have control over, have you ever thought about the life-cycle of a reusable cup?

Here in Canada many people go to a drive thru restaurant to get their coffee, in big and powerful pickup and SUVs they don’t even bother to stop when waiting. That also counts, sadly.

Thank you.

1:49 I'm pretty sure you meant to say ~4.2 joules per degree for a gram of water. It is 4179.6 J K^-1 kg^-1 of water though and still really high.

While it is important to highlight the impact electricity and dairy products have on CO2 emissions, and I wholeheartedly agree that reducing these is important for our future, I would like to add that paper cups are still a problem. Just not to CO2 emissions. It is actually very cheap to produce paper cups, and they don't emit that much CO2 per cup, but their problem lies in having a thin plastic coating that takes ~500 years to be broken down by normal means. And that is the true problem of these cups. They are horrible for the environment because they take a lot of time to be broken down, and are indeed responsible for the piles of waste we see in these awareness commercials.

We use powdered milk. It's brilliant!

Hi Adam, greeting from the highlands of PNG and Lao. Delighted to learn from your life cycle analysis, we process coffee cherries with zero wastes, no highly polluted wastewater nor solid wastes. How could I reach out to you to explore potential collaboration to minimise our carbon footprint? Sam Say at Proceso Puro Circular Coffee.

Great video - thank you Adam! Have you done any research on the environmental impact of the cow’s milk alternatives? Would be really interested to know about that, as I have a sneaking suspicion that the increase in people using milk alternatives might end up having a really detrimental impact

Sounds like a lot of cafes could do with Solar panels and a good battery system, especially if they have some roof space.

Sadly it's very likely that your local coffee café couldn't even afford the improvements to reduce their carbon footprint. Unless something happens to change the price of green and reusable technology to make it more affordable which I hope it does happen

Great job!

Wonderful analysis! Just add that shifting to plant based milk would make a bigger difference.

So the solution is to drink black cold brew coffee for breakfast, lunch, and dinner

Thank you this was so informative!! I have a question though, when you showed the last graph where “consumption” had the largest footprint, what exactly does that mean? What emits the carbon in that phase?

Very interesting!

Interesting. Furthermore if you use a normal cup, ir has to be cleaned with water.... maybe that's even worse than papercup?

Thanks! Very interesting and important video!

Drink coffee black, enjoy it’s true taste and reduce pollution from milk production.

This is great. I don’t own a cafe or anything but something simple like lines in the milk steamer are those things we don’t think of be wise of course it should be there.

FACT : some countries iced menu they use plastic cup.. that’s make a lot of plastic waste.

The problem is animal milk. Not all milk.