JulieCraves

Coffee-related products / K-Cups/Keurig brewers: alternatives

K-Cup and other single-use pods: the waste issue, again

I’ve written several posts on the Keurig single-cup coffee brewers, or more specifically, about the K-Cup single use coffee “pods” and the waste they generate. I have explored, in detail, three ways to cope with this waste:

In each post I’ve also discussed the progress (or lack thereof) that Keurig owner Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR) has had on finding sustainable or recyclable materials for use in the K-Cups.

This week the New York Times had a worthwhile article on the continuing dilemma of the convenience of single-cup coffee versus the waste it generates. The article notes that it is expected that nearly 3 billion K-Cups will be sold this year. (We’ll get to the other brands of single-use coffee pods in a minute.)

The article mentions that GMCR are experimenting with a paper K-Cup (no foil or plastic) for use with tea this year; the issues surrounding brew temperature and freshness of coffee apparently still have them stymied. GMCR goes on to say that they have done a life-cycle analysis of the environmental impact of the K-Cup and determined that most of the impacts occur where the packaging is produced, not where the waste is disposed. But this doesn’t mean the waste stream doesn’t have a big impact, and this leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of some consumers.

The article goes on to describe the fact that some of the competitors of K-Cups can be recycled. This is a bit misleading, as these options are very limited. TerraCycle will reuse the plastic from Kraft’s Tassimo pods in Britain (and Mars’ Flavia packages). These recycling options are not available to consumers in the U.S., but offices and food services providers. Nestlé’s aluminum Nespresso pods can be recycled at some propietary boutiques in a few European countries. Sara Lee’s Senseo pods are made of paper and therefore compostable (how many consumers just throw them away, though?).

Even supposing these options were widely and easily available to consumers worldwide, I still believe that K-Cups are the most environmentally-friendly product in the single-use arena.

Why? GMCR sources coffee responsibly and has a strong corporate responsibility and environmental record.* You simply cannot say the same thing about Nestlé, Kraft, and Sara Lee. For just a few examples, you can read my posts deconstructing the sustainability claims of Nestlé, Kraft, and Sara Lee; read how Kraft and Nestlé got caught purchasing illegally grown coffee because they don’t even know where much of their coffee comes from; and take a look at the how a major organization ranked these big coffee companies in areas like the environment, human rights, health and safety, etc. Finally, you can see how these big corporate coffee roasters exploit farmers and the environment, to the detriment of us all.

The most sustainable choice is to not use single-cup brewing systems in the first place. If they are going to be used, then consumers have to look at the big picture. With the Keurig system, there are alternatives to throwing away K-Cups, as outlined in my other posts. If disposable K-Cups are going to be used, consumers are easily able to find sustainably-sourced coffee, including Rainforest Alliance certified Caribou Coffee K-Cups. And at least using K-Cups will be better than supporting the dismal environmental  and ethical records of the big corporate coffee roasters that manufacture other brands.

*UPDATE: Now that Folgers and Dunkin Donuts coffees are available in K-Cups and GMCR seems willing to license to anybody, no matter how bad the sourcing, I am modifying this statement. Let’s just say that more responsibly-sourced coffees (including Caribou and GMCRs own coffees) are available for the Keurig brewer, and there are a lot of options for avoiding the use of wasteful K-Cups altogether by using your own coffee. Do that.

Research on coffee growing

Research: Farmers, prices, and shade coffee

Why shade coffee does not guarantee biodiversity conservation. 2010. Tejada-Cruz, C., E. Silva-Rivera, J. R. Barton, and W. J. Sutherland. Ecology and Society 15: [online] http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss1/art13/.

The title of this paper should probably be “Does promoting shade coffee encourage forest conversion?” This question is perfectly legitimate, and has been debated in the literature before [1,2]. I’m not sure, due to methodological and other weaknesses, this paper adds a lot to this debate. It addresses, hypothetically, what coffee farmers might do if coffee prices increased, theoretically due to increased demand created by promotion of shade coffee to consumers.

The authors interviewed 57 coffee farmers inside and outside the buffer zone of El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas, Mexico. Farmers were chosen by the “snowball technique” in which one farmer refers the authors to the next person to be interviewed and so on, so a linkage is assumed between respondents. The authors did not address how this may have biased responses, e.g., shared attitudes regarding forest conservation, risk perception, or coffee production; mutual membership in cooperatives with an organizational slant towards particular farming methods; or similar economic pressures.

The salient question in the interviews for this paper was whether the farmers would convert forested areas on their property to “shade coffee” (not defined) if coffee prices increased. The authors did not specify in their interviews how much of an price increase or how long it would need to continue to influence farmer behavior.

About half of the respondents within the buffer zone said they would be likely to convert forest remnants into shade coffee if prices increased, while this figure was around a third for those outside the buffer zone (where less forest remained to be converted).

This might be instructive, but is missing critical elements. For example: even if the farmers wanted to convert forest, could they? The introduction states that this paper sheds light on “how small-scale coffee growers make decisions on land use when confronted with the choice to switch from conventional to eco-friendly’ labeled coffee.” The authors did not make this explicit in the Methods or survey questions, but given the context of the paper, “eco-friendly labeled coffee” presumably means certified by some agency with environmental standards.

All “eco-friendly” certifying agencies have restrictions on clearing of forest or cultivation in forested areas in their standards, a fact noted in the introduction of the paper. This includes one of the major coffee purchasers in the area, Starbucks. Their C.A.F.E. Practices is not a certification, but a sourcing guideline. One of their mandatory requirements is that there is no conversion of natural forest to agricultural production. Non-compliance would make it difficult if not impossible to become a Starbucks supplier. If farmers were unable to gain “eco-friendly” certification or status, they would be unable to access the increased prices being offered, and the question becomes, in practice, a moot point.

The authors acknowledge conversion is generally not allowed, but that they observed conversion occurring anyway. The circumstances and details were not explained, and it’s unclear from this paper what was going on — whether these farmers were doing so outside a certification system, if they were just not being audited, etc. Without more facts, it’s difficult to ascertain the extent of the problem and what would remedy it.

Within the buffer zone of the reserve, only certain activities are permitted [3]. This includes organic coffee production (which typically requires at least some shade) but not “traditional coffee production” except under certain conditions. It’s worth noting that if coffee prices fell or remained stagnant, farmers might turn to other permitted activities which might not be so eco-friendly, including palm cultivation, organic corn, or cattle management. Some discussion of this would have been helpful in the paper.

The authors report that, according to the farmers interviewed, there has been an increase in the cultivation area, “allegedly at the expense of forest,” although there is no external corroboration.  An accompanying figure graphs the increase in acreage in coffee and decrease in forest patches based on the farmers’ answers; the decade covered was 1991-2001. There is no correlation with coffee prices to provide a link to the theme of the paper. That decade, in fact, was the run-up and commencement of the world coffee crisis, one of (if not the) most volatile periods in modern coffee history. Prices went from a high of nearly $3.00/lb in the mid-1990s to a low of less than $0.50/lb in 2001.

The paper states that there was a “steady increase in cultivation area” for this period, which seems unlikely — when prices began to fall after the peak, many farmers didn’t continue to expand their plots, they abandoned them. Perhaps the 2001 end-point was too soon to reflect this. If these interviews were really done around 2001 (the date is not given), when prices were at 30-year lows and farmers were literally starving, it’s hard to imagine farmers not saying they’d convert forest for higher prices. Is this really indicative of what farmer would do in a more stable market? One of the major lessons learned from the coffee crisis is that prices drop when there is an oversupply and this type of overplanting is generally now discouraged.

Without some discussion of what actually happened in this area during this period to these farmers, using this graph as support for the argument that they will convert forest to coffee during an increase in prices makes little sense. There was a follow up question on the survey asking farmers to explain why they would or would not convert their forest to shade coffee. That would surely shed some light on their motivations and experiences, but it was not discussed in the paper.

Some of the discussion surrounding the theme in this paper is worthwhile. But the title of this paper makes quite a definitive negative statement. It is no doubt true under various circumstances,  but the facts in the paper don’t quite back up the claim. Shade coffee, grown under diverse shade — especially when organic and certified using strong, verified standards — is still one of the most environmentally-friendly agricultural alternatives for biodiversity conservation available.

[1] Philpott, S. and T. Dietsch. 2003. Coffee and conservation: A global context and the value of farmer involvement. Conservation Biology 117(6):1844-1846.

[2] Rappole, J. H., D. I. King, and J. H. Vega Rivera. 2003. Coffee and conservation. Conservation Biology 17:334-336.

[3] Castro Hernandez, J. C., R. Hernandez Janapa, S. Nanuez Jimenez, S.R. Rodriquez Alcazar, C. Tejeda Cruz, A. Vazquez Vazquez, K. Batchelder, A.Z. Maldonado Fonseca. 2003. Community-based Conservation Participatory Conservation in Buffer Zone Communities in the Natural Protected Areas of Chiapas, Mexico. The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA. 65. pp.

C. Tejada-Cruz, E. Silva-Rivera, J. R. Barton, & W. J. Sutherland (2010). Why shade coffee does not guarantee biodiversity conservation Ecology and Society, 15 (1)

Retail and specialty roasters

GoCoffeeGo

One of the highlights of my week is visiting the web sites of my favorite responsible coffee roasters and exploring what new sustainably-grown beans are available for me to try. For those of you who are not as thrilled with the shopping process, there is GoCoffeeGo.

GoCoffeeGo is a web site that brings together offerings from a variety of specialty coffee roasters across the U.S. Most of them are roasters that carry several varieties of sustainably-grown beans (often certified), provide details on origin, and freqently have direct relationships with producers — all criteria I use to define “responsible roasters.” In fact, many of the roasters are on my list and a number of their coffees have been reviewed here.

Most of the same selections available on the web sites of individual roasters are also available at GoCoffeeGo, at the same price. Orders are drop shipped, so there is no more delay between roasting and arrival than there would be if you had ordered directly from the roaster. Besides bringing together all these great coffees at no mark-up, GoCoffeeGo offers weekly specials that are not offered by the roasters — discounts, free shipping, etc.

Having gathered these specialty roasters, GoCoffeeGo enables visitors to search for beans in many different categories, the relevant ones for us being organic, Rainforest Alliance, shade grown, and sustainable. A word about these categories.

Certified coffees are produced under particular conditions. The categories “organic” and “Rainforest Alliance” both represent certifications, and you can read about their certification requirements in my quick guide to coffee certifications.

Things are a little murkier for the categories “shade grown” and “sustainable.” There isn’t a legal definition for either, leaving it up to producers, importers, exporters, roasters, and/or retailers to decide if their product fits those categories, by their own definitions. There are a host of problems with that, as I outlined in “Who evaluates non-certified coffee?” parts one and two. (I use these terms all the time myself; I define shade according to this shade management diagram, and the definition I use for “sustainable coffee” is in a box on the User Guide page.)

So you still might need to do a little homework when buying your beans (you can use my top 5 indicators of sustainable coffee for some help), but GoCoffeeGo has done a lot of the legwork for you. There are plenty of other search tools, ratings, and recommendations on the site to further ease your journey.

Certifications / Organic coffee

New organic and eco-friendly coffee market data

(Update: I now regularly update the post Eco-certified coffee: How much is there? when new information is available.)

The North American Organic Coffee Industry Report 2010 by Daniele Giovannucci shows that the North American organic coffee market topped $1.4 billion dollars in 2009. This represents 93 million pounds (around 42,000 metric tons) of organic coffee imported into the United States and Canada, a 4.1% growth since last year.

Meanwhile, Rainforest Alliance reports that it sold 193 million (87,583 metric tons) of certified coffee in 2009 (worldwide), up 41%. They estimate this as 1.5% of the international export market

In its 2009 annual report (PDF), UTZ Certified announced the amount of coffee it certified was up over 18% to whopping 804 million pounds (365,000 metric tons), produced in 21 countries. The report also noted that UTZ Certified arabica coffee provided an average premium of 5.7 cents/lb.

2009 figures are not yet available for Smithsonian’s Bird-Friendly certified coffee (which is also certified organic), but their 2008 figures are in this post, when I last provided market share data on eco-friendly coffees.

For a little perspective, world production in 2009 was about 7.4 million metric tons, and the U.S. imported 1.4 million metric tons of coffee. Sustainably-grown coffees are still a small slice of the pie.

Photo by Joe McCarthy under a Creative Commons license.