Hold The Milk! A Green Guide To Drinking Tea And Coffee

Just read a fascinating article in the Guardian by Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark around the carbon footprint of a cup of tea or coffee.

I saw the headline: “What's the carbon footprint of ... a cup of tea or coffee?” and thought: What does it matter? Surely the carbon footprint of a cup of tea or coffee is so small that it’s not even worth considering.

Well some of us do drink an awful lot of coffee and tea so maybe it adds up to a significant amount. But is it significant enough for us to consider how we take our tea and coffee and how we prepare it?

So what’s the score when it comes to tea and coffee?

Berners-Lee and Clark present us with these figures:

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

What strikes one immediately is the difference in carbon footprint that taking tea or coffee white makes. Taking milk more than doubles the carbon footprint of a cup of tea or coffee. It’s surprising at first that the milk makes such a difference. One might have expected that the growing and transporting of the tea and coffee itself would have been the biggest factor but no it’s the milk. Why? Well milk comes from cows and as ruminants they produce an awful lot of methane at both ends!

Berners-Lee and Clark claim that drinking three large lattes a day equates to twenty times as much carbon equivalent as flying half way across Europe.

So the most environmentally sound beverages other than cold water seem to be black tea or coffee made with water from a kettle that’s been used to boil just enough water to fill the cups and no more and certainly not sugared.

So green tea really is amongst the greenest drinks one could choose!

Enough thinking I’m off for a brew.