Coffee company calculates carbon cost

From the bean picking and roasting to the electricity for grinding them and boiling the water, an independent roaster based.

On Salt Spring Island has calculated the emissions created during the entire life of its coffee beans as it strives to track its environmental footprint become carbon neutral.

Salt Spring Coffee Co., a fair trade, organic roaster that borrows its name from the quaint hippie hideaway off Vancouver Island, asked a Vancouver-based carbon offsetting company Offsetters to look at every aspect of the coffee-making process.

Offsetters found a 400-gram bag of Salt Spring's french roast coffee from Nicaragua produces 1,807-grams of carbon dioxide. To reach that total, Offsetters examined a bean's entire life cycle:

Farming the beans in Nicaragua.
* Transporting them to Canada.
* Roasting and packaging them on Salt Spring Island.
* Distributing and selling the coffee.
* Brewing the coffee on a consumer's kitchen counter.
* More often than not, tossing the used grounds in the garbage.

The final tally might not sound like much, but it adds up over time.

The Coffee Association of Canada conducted a survey in 2003 that suggested the average coffee drinker here consumes 2.6 cups a day.
Footprint same as flying Ottawa to Montreal

That means a year of drinking Salt Spring's Nicaraguan coffee — each bag can brew about 50 cups — would produce about 34,000 grams of carbon dioxide, which is about the same as driving a mid-sized car for 170 kilometres. That's also the size of carbon offsets that Offsetters sells for a single traveller on a commercial flight between Ottawa and Montreal.

And two-thirds of that total is produced by consumers brewing the coffee at home and then throwing out the used grounds, said Mickey McLeod, CEO of Salt Spring Coffee.

"I was quite surprised with how much the consumer has an impact on one of these bags of coffee — it was quite amazing," McLeod said during an announcement at a Salt Spring Coffee café in Vancouver.

"The real upside to this is it opens up awareness to the consumer about how they can actually help reduce their personal impact."

Salt Spring Coffee has been buying carbon offsets to make its operations carbon neutral since 2007, but that hasn't included the farming of the beans or the footprint of consumers.

On Tuesday, the company announced bags of its Nicaraguan French roast will also include offsets for the farming, picking and pre-processing in Nicaragua — which account for just two per cent of the total.

The company said that makes it the first carbon neutral coffee in Canada until the beans are sold to consumers.

For the remaining 64 per cent of the emissions, the company is urging its customers to reduce their footprint by making simple changes, such as ensuring they only use the amount of water they need and composting the used grounds instead of throwing them away.

"When it leaves the retail outlet, they [Salt Spring Coffee] no longer have control, but they do have influence," said Donovan Woollard of Offsetters.

"The purpose of the announcement today is to influence those people who are buying the product and encourage them to use it responsibly."

To balance emissions, Offsetters sells carbon offsets and then uses the money to fund clean energy projects. The idea is that those projects will eventually reduce emissions elsewhere by the same amount.

Offsetters was also the official provider of carbon offsets for the Vancouver Winter Olympics.