Reducing carbon footprint of typical coffee consumption from the whole lifecycle viewpoint

Abstract

With around two billion cups consumption daily worldwide, the coffee industry faces pressures to improve its sustainability. Currently, coffee culture has gradually integrated into the lives of global people. However, very few studies have focus on how to reduce its lifecycle carbon emissions. This study is designed to establish a scientific benchmark to evaluate and compare the carbon footprint of four kinds of coffee (hot Americano, iced Americano, hot latte coffee, and iced latte coffee) from two coffee shops (shop T and shop O) in Macao, investigate the major contributors or factors, and provide some effective measures for coffee carbon emissions mitigation. The results shows that the unit carbon footprint of iced latte (0.86 kg CO2e) is higher than the other three coffees (hot latte-0.84 kg CO2e, iced Americano-0.29 kg CO2e, hot Americano-0.07 kg CO2e). From the perspective of life cycle, the raw material acquisition phase has the largest carbon emissions, accounting for 69.44%–96.80% of the total carbon emissions. Among them, milk and plastic cups consumption are the two main source of high carbon emissions. Further analysis shows that the replacement of milk and plastic cups with oat milk and oat cups reduces carbon emissions by 69.57%. For the whole Macao, carbon emissions of the ideal scenario will be about 3721.87 ton CO2e in 2050—43.98% less than the baseline scenario increase.