Episode transcript:
Listener: “Hey, Living Planet team. My name is Brian and I'm from Brazil. I love your program and I have a suggestion for your new what's better segment? As somebody who loves both tea and coffee, I've often wondered which of the two is more sustainable. Would be great to get your thoughts on this. Thanks.”
Neil: Thank you very much to Brian for that great suggestion. And that’s exactly what we’ll be doing this week. My colleague Jennifer Collins took on this challenge and I can tell you that she made some very interesting discoveries. So get ready for a full blown tour of how the coffee and tea trade started and the impact it is having on our planet and societies and of course Brian will have his answer by the end of the programme. My name is Neil King and this is Living Planet.
Jennifer: Did you know that tea is the second most consumed drink after water? And coffee isn't far behind! We drink billions of cups of these caffeinated beverages each day. I'm a huge tea drinker, probably averaging about 5 cups a day. But the coffee people are always trying to entice me over to their side. So, it really got a question (ahem) brewing in my mind... about the environmental impact of tea and coffee. Is one better than the other? Can we do anything to lessen the damage caused by both? And why are we so obsessed with these drinks in the first place? Because...
Mark Maslin:…you have to remember that coffee and tea are luxury goods. They're not required for us. We can survive quite happily without coffee even though it's agricultural. If it disappeared tomorrow, people's lives would be less interesting, but their health wouldn't suddenly deteriorate. You're not losing vital vitamins or calories or anything like that.
Jennifer: That's Mark Maslin and we'll come back to him later but he's a professor of Earth System Science at University College London, which means he studies
Mark: climate change in the past, present and future. It allows me to look at the full system: humans, the natural environment and how they interact, so everything from early human evolution to coffee
Jennifer: And more importantly, he's ...
Mark:..definitely a coffee drinker I cannot actually function until I've had at least my first half cup of coffee.
Neil: A man after my own heart. Ok, so sounds like you've got some tea-riffic questions there ... We've got to get all the tea and coffee puns out of our system now.
Jennifer: We really do ... So, I have to say, these questions kind of sent me down a rabbit hole. And I just really wanted to understand how these drinks became this integral to the daily grind of our lives – ok that's the last pun, I promise.
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So let me take you back in time to the origins of coffee and tea, specifically black tea, and how they literally helped fuel the
Mark: the empire building of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Jennifer: and in an indirect way capitalism and climate change. So put your feet up, stick the kettle or the coffee maker on ...
Neil: Ok, let me get another coffee and let's go ...
Jennifer: We'll start with coffee ... Picture this. It's the 9th Century. It's late at night. There's a light breeze
The moon is shining brightly across the Ethiopian plains, and you can see the Milky Way. Your name is Kaldi. You're a goat herder and you're struggling to stay awake. You notice that your flock are munching away on some red berries from a bush. The goats are suddenly full of energy.
You try some yourself and you're so exhilarated by the hit of caffeine, you run to a nearby monastery to spread the news. A monk you meet is very disapproving and throws the berries into the fire.
The gorgeous aroma of coffee wafts across the monastery and brings other monks to investigate. One genius monk rakes the roasted beans from the fire and dissolves them in hot water. And the world has its first cup of coffee.
Well, that's one of the legends of the discovery of coffee from Ethiopia, which really is the birthplace of the drink. The shrubs grow wild in the African country, and they were probably used by nomadic tribes for thousands of years as a stimulant.
Around the 1400s people realized they could roast the beans. It spread throughout North Africa and the Near East. In Yemen, Arab Sufi monks used it to keep themselves awake during midnight prayers. Coffee then reached the Mediterranean and entered Europe in the 17th Century.
As more people began drinking coffee, European empires wanted to get in on the trade ...
Amy Stockwell: It was taken out by the Brits, the Spanish, the Dutch to their colonies and grown. And you can really follow the history of our empires along with where coffee is grown.
Jennifer: That's Amy Stockwell. She's an environmental and Life Cycle Analysis Specialist, which is
Amy: I like to liken it to calculating costs. But instead of calculating costs in euros or dollars, we calculate the cost in terms of kilograms of CO2 and other environmental impacts.
Jennifer: Are you still with me Neil? Do you need another shot of caffeine?
Neil: I'm still here... What about tea?
Jennifer: Tea has mythological roots too – in China.
It goes back to the legendary figure Shen Nong, a name that roughly translates as "divine farmer." He supposedly taught humans a lot of farming skills.
One day, Shen Nong is taking a walk through the forest, looking for herbs and grains to eat. And he accidentally poisons himself.
As he lies on the forest floor, convulsing in pain, a leaf from a tree just happens to fall into his mouth and he's cured. And that was how tea and its supposed healing properties were discovered.
Really though, tea leaves boiled in water have been drunk in China as a medicine for millennia. The Chinese began cultivating and processing it around the third century and it later spread to Japan and other parts of Asia.
The Dutch brought tea to Europe in the 17th Century. But tea was a particularly British endeavor, says UCL professor Mark Maslin. Production...
Mark: taken from China to bring to India so the British Empire could actually survive and actually survive on that tea. That's the only thing that drove the British Empire was tea production.
Former British colonies, India, Sri Lanka and Kenya are top tea producers today partly because British rulers expanded cultivation there. Tea drinking has become so synonymous with Britishness that one of the worst things you can say about someone there is that "they're not your cup of tea."
As demand for luxury goods like coffee and tea increased, global sea trade routes flourished, and mercantile capitalism swept the globe.
Empires, including the British, Portuguese, French and Dutch, expanded. They competed for colonies, razing forest and other habitats to plant cash crops with little thought for the environmental impacts – which are still felt today.
For a time, transnational corporations like the British East India and the Dutch East India companies, led these colonial adventures on behalf of their countries and ruled the waves in the pursuit of profit.
Mark: So you're looking at spices, you're looking at the teas the coffees. The things that weight for weight were more valuable than gold. Those companies had bigger standing armies than the countries. They were controlling areas larger than their home country and they were um, some of the atrocities that were done underneath in terms of the pursuit of profit were appalling.
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Jennifer: To maximize profit, Empires imported slaves from Africa to work on plantations in the Americas, East Indies and the Caribbean, starting one of the darkest periods in human history: the Transatlantic Slave Trade. 12 million enslaved Africans were shipped across the Atlantic to work the plantations from the 16th to the 19th Centuries.
Neil: A very dark time indeed. So I see how coffee and tea are linked to empire – and its terrible history. But what about climate change?
Jennifer: Ok, so this is where it gets a bit more complicated but bear with me.
As empires expanded, wealth from the colonies poured into countries like Britain, where the conditions for the Industrial Revolution were starting to take shape in the 17 and 18th Centuries. The larger British public were developing a taste for tobacco, tea with sugar and coffee. These "drug foods" as they're called, were unique in that they couldn't be produced locally, were easily stored and were addictive.
A lot of complex things were happening then to transform society, but one theory is that people started to increase their work time and decrease their leisure time, partly to pay for these habit-forming goods. This moved more of society away from subsistence agriculture. Farmers were producing bigger food surpluses. Populations began to grow rapidly.
Atmo: Sounds of the Industrial revolution e.g. factories, mills
Mills and factories were sprouting up to process some of the other goods coming in from the colonies, like spinning cotton into fabric. And coffee and tea all gave workers that extra jolt, helping them to toil for the long hours demanded.
The educated classes were also coming together in coffee houses to discuss radical ideas and inventions. New technologies were improving rapidly. Like the steam engine, which initially made fossil fuel coal easier to mine and eventually led to the advent of steamboats and trains.
Mark: At the heart, I would say of British and European society was the development of the coffee house where people would come and actually discuss the politics of the day. Philosophy, science you know. The great science establishments in the UK came from the coffee house, you know, where scientists would get together or natural scientists and then they went oh. Let's set up a building. You know, let's set up the royal society you know and so I think that this.
By the 1840s, the Industrial Revolution began to spread to other countries. Within 40 years, it encompassed nearly all of Europe, the USA, Canada and Japan. The age of burning fossil fuels en masse had begun, and planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere began to rise. The global trade routes, along which coffee, tea and other goods, flow were cemented and consumer capitalism started to flourish.
Jennifer: So, Neil, after all that, we're back to the modern day. That's basically the story of how coffee and tea are closely linked with empire, capitalism and climate change – and why they are drunk the world over now. I think it's important to talk about that history to understand where we are now.
Neil: It's quite the story. Given they are both such popular agricultural products, transported all over the world, they must have some environmental impact?
Jennifer: Definitely, and that brings me to the other question: What is better for the environment: tea or coffee?
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Amy: So, it's very difficult on a kilogram-to-kilogram level to say one is better than the other.
That's life cycle analyst Amy Stockwell again, who by the way is...
Amy: a tea drinker. I spent 18 years in coffee research. I love it but I like sleeping even more.
But the reason why it's so hard to compare a kilogram of coffee beans versus a kilogram of tea is partly because with...
Amy: any agricultural product, there is a huge range in variety. They're grown in different countries. The weather's different. Farmers treat their crops differently. Some farms have a lot of mechanization. Some are more done by hand. So that leads to a huge range of results.
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So basically, it all depends on how that tea or coffee was farmed, as well as lots of other factors, and that really varies from farm to farm and country to country. Which means it's hard to make firm recommendations, says Stockwell. But there is some research looking at the entire life cycles of both products – from cultivation and transport to consumption and waste, or cradle to grave, as it's called.
And that generally points to...
Amy: When it comes to the tea and coffee themselves, uh, the impact tends to come from agriculture. Of course, every farm is different again.
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Mechanization of tea and coffee harvesting, irrigation, and the use of fertilizers, which emit nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, all contribute to the climate impact. Coffee, for instance, was traditionally planted in the shade of other trees. Now it's largely grown in huge plantations totally exposed to the sun, which requires more intensive use of water, fertilizer and pesticides.
Cutting forests down to make way for plantations is another factor here.
Lena Parztsch: So farm expansion is responsible for 90% of deforestation around the world. And much of the deforestation that occurs in countries of the global south serves to produce cash crops like coffee and black and green tea for export to countries of the global north like Germany.
Jennifer: That's Lena Partzsch, a professor of comparative politics focusing on environment and climate at Berlin's Free University and she's
Lena: particularly interested in the regulation of global supply chains because both coffee and ah tea black and green tea are products.
Jennifer: Partzsch is also a...
Lena: Coffee addict. The average for Germans is three cups a day and I think I drink more.
Jennifer: But back to deforestation. Tea is driving forest clearance in countries like Sri Lanka and India. But coffee's link to forest loss is particularly well documented, with around 130,000 hectares of trees vanishing each year to make way for plantations, according to the 2023 Coffee Barometer.
Lena: So coffee is one of the top products that costs deforestation. There's a study by Wageningen University where they estimate that 5% of deforestation can be attributed to coffee.
Jennifer: Once harvested, both products go into the processing stage. For tea, that involves withering, rolling, oxidation and drying. It varies for coffee, but it can be dried, hulled, fermented and depulped. The environmental impact of this stage depends on the kind of energy used – fossil or renewable. The next stage is transport from the country of origin to where the beverage is being consumed.
Again, estimates for tea and coffee differ wildly here. Some studies show transport has a relatively small CO2 footprint compared to the life cycle stages. Others show an outsized impact. Either way, fossil-fuel powered container ships and trucks do emit greenhouse gases. But one decisive factor is whether the product is transported by sea or air. A study by Mark Maslin and Carmen Nab from UCL found transport emissions dropped from around 90% to 50% with a switch from airplane to cargo ship.
Packaging is another factor determining the environmental impact of these two beverages. How much depends on the kind of packaging used. Is it plastic, or paper made from sustainable sources? Is it recyclable? Surprisingly, packaging has its upside too.
Amy: We have to think about what else the packaging is doing. It's stopping the food waste. Uh, which really is, is the key one. Uh, due a small amount of packaging that perhaps weighs five grams versus a kilogram of coffee. The five grams of packaging will have a much lower environmental impact. Coffee, particularly, uh, is needs a lot of protection from air, from oxygen.
One study from the University of Quebec even found that in some cases much derided coffee capsules could be better for the environment than say, a traditional filter coffee because they cut down on water use and coffee waste going to landfill where it rots and emits greenhouse gas methane. They recommended reusable rather than single-use capsules.
Amy: For coffee one of the key challenges is in waste. How often do we brew an entire pot of coffee and then only drink half of it? Uh, I've seen some data in the past that said, typically a third of a pot of coffee is wasted.
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Jennifer: That brings us back to our main question. And given all the caveats: can we say that coffee or tea is better for the environment?
Neil: And ... Can we?
Jennifer: Well, kind of. One way to get an idea of how tea and coffee weigh up is by comparing the carbon footprint
Amy: a cup of tea versus a cup of coffee and we'll keep it without milk and sugar to keep it simple for the moment
Jennifer: The winner in that case is, according to Mark and Amy. Hang on, we need some suspense music...
Mark: Tea
Amy: Overall, probably a cup of tea..
Jennifer: Well, obviously I'm delighted as a tea-drinker. Vindication - Just joking.
Neil: But why is that?
Jennifer: It basically because tea is ...
Mark: less in weight per cup
Jennifer: In other words
Amy: typically, in a cup of tea, a tea bag usually has about two grams of tea in it and a cup of coffee, whether it be capsule or instant or a, uh, a drip filter type cup, you use about seven grams of coffee beans. So, if we were to assume that the tea versus coffee is about the same, just because we use so many more coffee beans per cup, it's likely to be that coffee has a worse environmental impact.
Neil: Ah, I see, so less product means a lower carbon footprint?
Jennifer: Exactly, but wait Neil, there's more.
Amy: Then we added milk. And we tend to add more milk to coffee rather than tea. Of course, everybody's different, but it's the milk that actually has the biggest impact. So we're at least doubling the environmental impact, sometimes, quite easily, especially when you go for these really frothy fancy coffees with all sorts of exciting things on top.
Jennifer: And that's borne out in multiple studies. But if you're concerned about the climate and climate impact of tea and coffee consumption, there are lots of little changes you can make. Starting with ...
Amy: Only heating up the amount of water that you need is very important for tea. I always fill up the kettle more than I ought to. And of course, then I'm using all the extra electricity to heat more water than I'm going to use.
Various studies have shown that filling the kettle to capacity rather than just boiling what you need for a cup adds considerably to climate impact if your energy comes from fossil fuel sources. Other little tweaks include buying loose leaf tea instead of tea bags, which often contain plastic, and storing tea and coffee properly to help cut down on waste. If you can store coffee, for instance,
Amy: in an airtight container in the fridge or the freezer, it will stay fresh for a lot longer.
Jennifer: And there is one other small but very impactful change we can make:
Mark: The one thing I would say is when you have your coffee and tea actually the biggest decision you make is what milk you put into them.
Jennifer: So, switching to plant-based milk or taking your coffee and tea black is one quite easy thing to do. But, of course, it's not all down to consumers.
Businesses, farmers and governments have a role to play too. Mark Maslin and Carmen Nab's study of coffee found that using less fertilizer, managing water and energy more efficiently and exporting beans by cargo ship rather than plane, can slash the crop's carbon emissions by around 77%. Businesses can also look for more environmentally friendly packaging and use renewable energy where possible.
Maslin added that farmers should be paid properly for their product so they can grow coffee and tea as sustainably as possible. Right now, farmers earn about a penny for each cup of coffee sold. And we also need to be careful that ...
Mark: As our demand for coffee and tea grows, we don't then resort to deforesting new areas for that production. We look at other ways of actually increasing productivity. Looking at areas that actually we can use which haven't been deforested which have already been sort of like degraded and we can then perhaps use that land and actually bring that up to the standard we need.
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Jennifer: Some coffee and tea companies are signed up to voluntary certification schemes to try to ensure their products are sustainable across their whole life cycle and come from land that hasn't been deforested. Countries have also tried including environmental conditions in international trade agreements. But supply chains are complex and beans and leaves often come from different sources, so it's not always easy to monitor. The European Union though is trying to force the issue with the
Lena: EU deforestation regulation which was passed last June
Jennifer: That's political scientist and supply chain expert Lena Partzsch again. Cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm-oil, soya, wood, rubber, charcoal and printed paper products are covered by the new rules. Companies will have to show that their products aren't from deforested land. EU consumption actually caused around 10% of forest losses between 1990 and 2020.
The bloc is also trying to bring in another regulation which would require EU companies to manage social and environmental impacts along their entire supply chain. Whether these regulations will work in practice remains to be seen but
Lena: Unlike earlier certification initiatives, enforcement now no longer depends on but the voluntary choice of individual consumers. But um, the European Union is basically using its entire purchasing power to enforce certain standards on importers.
Music – Picturesque
Jennifer: That kind of brings us back to where we started: global trade and consumer capitalism. The thing is that the climate change unleashed by the flourishing of that trade and the beginning of the fossil fuel age is endangering our cup of tea and coffee now.
Take coffee. Consumption is expected to double in the next 25 years or so. But in a world that is 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, Mark Maslin says,
Mark: the area in the world that we can map out would be good for coffee growing halves. So that's going to cause a huge issue when we're looking at future production.
That's because coffee needs very specific conditions to grow in.
Mark: It's a bit like us. You know we like it nice and warm. We like a little bit of decent humidity. We don't want it to ah hot, sweaty etc. Coffee is about the same. I think coffee likes a little bit warmer than humans and to give you an idea of this of like range.
Jennifer: Small farmers also do some 50% of the world's food and agricultural production and as temperatures rise, the number of days when people can work outside will shrink. It will simply be too hot and humid. That won't just affect the tea and coffee harvest but other vital food sources too.
Mark: That's the greatest threat to human health which is these people won't be able to work outside as much as they do now, and they won't be able to work at critical times when they need to harvest that's going to affect their health but it's also going to affect the food production and the agricultural ah cash coming into those communities which is then going to affect global health.
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Jennifer: So, the question becomes now, how quickly can we adapt to rising temperatures? And can the world move away from fossil fuels quickly enough to stop the planet heating past 1.5 degrees Celsius or even 2 degrees – the limits agreed by world leader in Paris in 2015 to stop even worse damage from climate change. I mean, as Mark Maslin says, burning fossil fuels for energy was ..
Mark: really successful in the twentieth century. We lifted billions of people out of poverty. Ah life expectancy grew massively the world population doubled so Tick Tick Tick the problem is it has a side effect which is it then heats up the atmosphere and causes. Huge issues. The problem now is how we actually go from twentieth century technology to twenty first century technology. And the problem is that's where the colonial legacy comes in because there are so many vested interests from I would say western countries which are fully invested in the fossil fuel economy that it's very difficult to break that.***
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Jennifer: So I'll leave it there, Neil. And let all that percolate...
Neil: Thanks Jen. That really was super informative and I really enjoyed getting the history of both tea and coffee at the same time.
This week’s episode of Living Planet was researched and scripted by Jennifer Collins. It was edited and produced by me Neil King and our sound engineer was Gerd Georgii. If you have any environmental dilemmas that you’d like us to look at pls send us a voice message our email to livingplanet@dw.com. And if you’re enjoying the new segments we’ve been including in the podcast recently why not write a short review on Apple Podcasts or if possible leave a rating for us wherever you get your podcasts.
That’s it from the Living Planet team for now. Take it easy and take care.
Show notes:
Study on the carbon footprint of a cup of tea is here.
Life cycle assessment synthesis of the carbon footprint of Arabica coffee is here.
Environmental Implications of Consumer Convenience: Coffee as a Case Study is here.
Other sources for this episode included The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene by Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis, and Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast.