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I’m happy to introduce a new series of posts aimed at revealing the actual environmental costs of some of the products we use every day, starting with coffee, just because it’s Monday!

If you’re like me, you need a cup (or two) of coffee before the engines fire up in the morning. And, if you’re like me you’re always amazed at how empty your pockets are after a week of buying the coffee. But have you ever thought about the actual cost of that cup?

Coffee is the world’s second most traded commodity after petrolium. That’s 2.5 billion pounds every year. Among the problems associated with coffee production are: land use for production, deforestation to gain additional land, and mistreatment of coffee plantation workers. Not to mention transporting it from the tropical regions it grows in to North America where nearly half of it is consumed, and serving it in disposable cups.

Traditionally, coffee plants were grown under the protection of the rainforest canopy, but in the last half century, a variety of coffee plant yielding 3 times the product but requiring sun has become dominant, in some countries making up 70% of production.

The simple switch to this variety has meant that where coffee production and rainforest biodiversity used to go hand in hand, they’re now at odds. And odds are, the $10 Billion dollar crop will win.

With deforestation in the tropics comes soil erosion, and with erosion come contaminated rivers and streams. What’s more, monoculture practices promote the spread of diseases and pests, whose movement from one coffee plant to the next used to be blocked by the now missing trees. The result is widespread pesticide application and, ironically, a need for new varieties bred or genetically modified to resist the diseases that they would not have succumbed to had the previous “new variety” not been introduced.

The tally so far? My morning coffee has cost millions of hectares of our planet’s most effective natural carbon sink, the introduction of nasty chemicals to biologically sensitive areas and 25 Million workers, and a loss in biodiversity estimated s high as 90% of species. And I haven’t even started on the human rights issues.

By now, thanks in part to efforts by celebrities like Cold Play, most of us are at least aware of the issue of Fair Trade, even if we don’t actively seek Fair Trade goods. In a nutshell, Fair Trade organizations strive to ensure that workers’ basic human rights are maintained; that they’re paid enough to develop some self-sufficiency, and that their cultivation practices are relatively safe and sustainable.

That said, Fair Trade certification does not guarantee that the coffee is shade grown. For a true sustainability assurance, consumers need to seek Rainforest Alliance-certified (RAC) coffee. So far, that’s not an easy task, with RAC making up less than 5% of world coffee to date. But a new $94 million UN-sponsored project seeks to more than double the market share of sustainable coffee by 2013. And it looks set to meet its target with companies like (I hate to say it) McDonald’s stepping up, and committing to switch all of its UK and Ireland locations to RAC coffee.

So what then IS the cost of your coffee? Well, no one really knows: no one that will admit the number publicly, at least. What I can tell you is that in 2003, Starbucks commissioned CH2M Hill to audit their carbon emissions from shipping of the product and facility management, but ignoring those from the production of the coffee (ie deforestation) because, apparently, they have no control over those operations. The result? 376 000 tons.

Final Tally: A venti dark roast costs about $2.50, 0.5lbs CO2, and 45 square feet of rainforest.
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