Eco-Friendly Coffee: Is it Really Worth the Hype?

This is a guest post by Dana Livingston. Learn more about how you can guest post for Daily Shot Of Coffee here.

As the climate steadily changes and the natural world around us of plants and animals slowly begins to depreciate, the drive to switch to more eco-friendly and sustainable ways of living grows more and more steam. People around the world are beginning to make the switch to green living, refitting their homes with environment friendly infrastructures, buying cars which make less of an impact on the quality of the atmosphere, using material products that are non threatening and non taxing on the earth, eating organically grown food. The list runs on and on. The way businesses function, the products they produce, the way countries are run, and the sources of the global food supply have all been radically rethought to consider the influence of our human decisions on the natural environment. And this includes everything, down to the coffee you drink. But what is eco-friendly coffee? And does this really make a difference and impact on the global biodiversity and ecosystems?

Second to petroleum, the coffee bean is one of the most globally traded and harvested products. Within the United States alone, over four hundred million cups of coffee are consumed every day. And have you ever thought about how many coffee beans go into making a single cup of coffee? And with the hype surrounding coffee these days regarding its positive effects on our health, the demand for coffee has never been higher. And in countries with few other exports, coffee beans provide them with the most stable, consistent, and viable string of income.

But what’s the difference between eco-friendly and eco-threatening coffee beans? The traditional, environmentally damaging, way of producing coffee beans is to first create the coffee plantation, which entails clearing out acres upon acres of natural environments and ecosystems in order to do so. In these cases, pesticides and chemicals are usually used to keep the coffee fields clear of insects and reptiles. This in turn not only depletes the area of its natural wild life and wilderness, but the use of chemicals causes cancer in the low-wage paid workers tending to the fields and people in villages or towns surrounding the field that drink from the water that runs off from the fields; these chemicals are sometimes sprinkled over the ground and consequently kill larger animals confusing the chemicals for water or food.

Eco-friendly coffee beans are planted and harvested on shade plantations, which are plantations with natural tree canopies surrounding the fields. These tree canopies allow some of the areas smaller animals – insects, birds, reptiles, etc – to thrive in the safety of the trees and the habitat they provide. Moreover, these shade plantations prevent the segmentation and fragmenting of natural habitats. Because large areas of habitat are not destroyed to clear out room to allow for the making of these fields, these animals are able to move freely throughout these larger areas and are ensured their genetic diversity.

So is that cup of eco-friendly coffee worth the hype? Only if you think protecting and ensuring the survival of our world’s plant and animal life, and even saving the lives of our fellow human beings, is a high priority.

Dana Livingston is a writer for a culinary institute website where you can browse schools and the latest trends in the culinary arena.