On Roasting, Shipping and Carbon Footprints… Does Local Trump Food Miles?

Photo Source: http://www.freshandeasy.com/blog/2007_05_01_archive.html
I can’t wait to have one of these stores near me

I’ve been so busy roasting, cupping and adding new coffees that I haven’t had time to pontificate on deep and meaningful things in the space lately.  So here’s a little something to chew on…

I’ve been thinking about carbon footprints lately.  We’ve spent a lot of money to help design, debug and install the ultra-efficient Revelation roaster (note that the photos on Dan’s website are of our roaster).  I would like to promote the environmental advantages of our roasting system, and locally that’s really a no-brainer.  Our machine utilizes catalytic oxidation to eliminate smoke, then we recirculate the hot air back to the roaster.  The net effect is a MUCH more efficient system, as I will describe.  So if you lived here and required no shipping for your coffee, and you had a choice between buying coffee from us, and from somebody with a conventional roasting system, you would have less carbon impact if you bought it from us.  This much is certainly true, as I will describe.  The question I would like to answer is, what if you lived far enough away that it required shipping?  Does efficient roast + ship equal less carbon impact than local roast on conventional system?  What is the shipping distance where efficient roast loses out to shipping?

I was inspired by a paper from Tyler Coleman and Pablo Paster, entitled “Red, White and Green: The Cost of Carbon in the Global Wine Trade”, published by the American Association of Wine Economists.  I exchanged email with Pablo, and was able to adapt his work to my coffee question above.

The first question to answer is the difference in carbon output between my roasting system and a conventional system of the same size.  For sake of comparison, I went to the specifications for a conventional system that I was considering before I went with the Revelation; I made sure to use the specs for a system that also utilized catalytic oxidation to eliminate the smoke contribution, hence the differences I’m comparing are carbon due to energy consumption.  I’ll skip the calculations here and jump to the results: our Revelation produces 0.00004 ton CO2e per pound roasted.  A comparable, new conventional system produces 0.00181 ton CO2e per pound roasted.  Ours is favorable by 0.00177 ton CO2e per pound, or a whopping 97.7%.  That’s how much emitted CO2 you eliminate by buying your coffee from us instead of another local alternative, assuming you require no shipping.

So the question is then whether shipping generates more than 0.00177 ton CO2 per pound.  That’s 1607 grams CO2e per pound of coffee.  At some point it’s bound to happen, so how far can I ship it to you and still have favorable carbon differential?  Turns out the answer is pretty darn far.  Anywhere in the country, in fact.  Pablo’s research enabled me to answer the question; here’s the summary.

Let’s assume air freight for a minute.  At the end of a long string of math, it turns out that air freight generates 0.459 grams CO2e per mile shipped.  So I can air freight coffee up to 3500 miles and still produce less CO2 than roasting the same coffee locally in a conventional system.  Truck shipping is 2.26 times MORE favorable, i.e., lass carbon production, than air shipping (0.203 grams CO2e per mile).

So let’s say you live in Charlottesville, Virginia, 231 miles from my shop in Morrisville NC.  Buying a pound of coffee from me generates 36.3 grams CO2e.  Shipping it generates another 46.9 grams CO2e, for a total of 83.2 grams CO2e.  If you bought the same coffee locally and required no shipping, a conventional system would generate 1643.5 grams CO2e.  You achieve a 94.9% reduction in emitted CO2 by buying the coffee from me and shipping it.

What if you lived in Providence, Rhode Island, 683 miles away, and required air freight?  Your local alternative is still 1643.5 grams CO2e.  My roasting is still 36.3 grams.  Shipping adds another 313.5 grams CO2e, for a grand total of 349.8 grams CO2e.  You achieve a 78.7% reduction in emitted CO2 by buying from me and having it shipped by air.  California?  You still achieve a 14% reduction via air freight, and even more if shipped by truck.  Pretty cool, huh?

So if you buy local to keep your food dollars in your local economy and maintain relationships, you should keep doing that.  If you buy locally because you think food miles are adding to your carbon footprint, you would be right if you bought some coffee roasted on a conventional system.  But if you are trying to reduce your carbon footprint while still getting great coffee, you should buy it from us.

http://www.greenroasting.com

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The Rumors of my Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

I know, it’s been a while since I’ve updated the blog! But we’ve been busy!

In honor of Earth Day coming up this week, we had a team at my other Alma Mater, Duke University. They have quite a farmer’s market on Fridays and had an Earth Day theme for this market week; since we have such a sweet, earth-friendly roaster, we all thought it would be appropriate for us to make our market debut on Earth Day. So in between Tommy the strawberry guy (thanks for the asparagus, Tommy, it was awesome!) and Jason’s Deli, we sold quite a lot of coffee to the physicians and staff at the Duke medical center. To all you fellow Dukies, we say Thank You for such a great market welcome. We plan on being at your market every market day.

We debuted a couple new products this week. The first is our new Half Caf Blend. I must confess to not being a huge decaf fan, so when our recent customer survey said we needed a half caf, I swung for the fences. This blend utilizes some of my “comfort zone” coffees, beans I know are always exquisite. The downside is their availability is spotty (isn’t that true of all really great foods?), so if you want to try this blend order it now. Given the huge popularity of the blend, however, I will always have a great half caf on the menu.

The other new product was a spin on the classic Mocha Java blend that I call Mocha Java “Wild Type”. I’m not saying what it is that makes it so wild, but I will say this is a great coffee, one that qualifies as a Roastmaster Reserve. More importantly, I have gotten some preliminary customer feedback that indicates I’m not the only one that feels this way. So we will add this one to the menu later this week.

On Saturday we were at the Cary Farmers’ Market, where we had our first repeat customers. THANK YOU for your patronage, we are thrilled that you are enjoying the coffee. We also had some people take advantage of our order-ahead feature. Simply place your order on our web site, select the local pickup option at checkout, and add a comment to tell us you’ll pick up at the market. This is the only way we can guarantee you will get what you want – we try to anticipate the desired product mix, as well as the number of pre-ground we need to bring (no electricity to grind on site), but inevitably we turn away a few people who arrive after we’ve sold out of something.

It’s interesting to see the differences between markets. At Duke we had many requests for dark roasts and espressos. I guess residents still don’t get any sleep! We also saw almost no demand for pre-ground coffee. In Cary people are looking for milder coffees, and more pre-ground. Go figure.

So on Sunday we finally took a day off. Well, not completely off, of course, that would be crazy. But I did get in a long run with the Muddy Dog herself. Bailey is funny to run with; it reminds me of the opening scene in Talledega Nights – The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. It opens with a young Ricky Bobby who says only “I want to go fast”. That’s Bailey. I got over to Lionel’s bakery for a La Farm loaf, had a leisurely press pot of Mocha Java Wild Type with some of my fancy Swaziland sugar, and I got a haircut (thanks, Nick), then went to the Raleigh farmers’ market as a customer. I did swap out some of our inventory there for some fresh stuff (say Hey! to Charlene when you stop into The Berry Patch in the upper building to buy our coffee). I bought some glorious peas, the first of the season. God, I love this time of year. They were so good the kids ate about half of what I bought for a snack, raw, when I got home. And the guinea pigs love the pods, which are chock full of vitamin C. My gardening plans were spoiled by rain, but we have learned to cherish the rain.

I have a bunch of blog topics coming up… I’ve been reading Marion Nestle’s new book, What to Eat, and have some comments on that. I’ve been getting a little more involved in our local Slow Food convivium and there are some upcoming events to mention. A few new beans to put on the website, and a couple new ideas we’re going to try as a result of our customer survey (take the survey here and help us serve you better). Stay tuned!

http://www.muddydogcoffee.com

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Say Hello to My Little Friend

Do you think about the planet when you buy things?  Probably.  It’s almost impossible these days to be unaware, or not care, about issues related to global warming.  It seems natural to think about the planet when you buy a car, or a big kitchen appliance.  Some of us even think of the planet when we buy our coffee – is it Organic?  Shade Grown?  But do you think about the machine that roasted your coffee, and its impact on the planet?  Does it pollute the air?  Does is suck down power derived from fossil fuels?  Joel Starr, in the September 2007 Tea & Coffee Trade Journal http://www.allbusiness.com/environment-natural-resources/pollution-environmental/5523090-1.html observes that “In fact, it’s a safe assumption that coffee roasters and retailers at home, not producers at origin, are responsible for most of the pollution that coffee consumption produces (namely CO2 emissions from the roasting of the coffee and billions of one-time-use, disposable paper cups lids, stir-sticks, etc.). This has to do with many factors, not the least of which is the artisanal roasters preference for “drum” and “fluid-bed” type roasting machines, which have essentially not changed in decades. That is not to say that these machines haven’t improved, they just haven’t “gone green.” “  I’d venture to say not many coffee drinkers think about this particular issue.

In setting up our new roasting business, however, we did think about it.  Our new roaster, or ”Rosie” as she’s been affectionately named here, is one of a kind in the world (right now), and probably about the most eco-friendly roaster on the planet.  Our friend Dan Joliff of U.S. Roaster Corp http://www.usroastercorp.com built the Revelation roaster using advanced technology that virtually eliminates emissions and reduces power consumption to a fraction of a traditional roaster.  We were happy to partner with Dan to input to the design and be the first guinea pig, er, customer, for this exciting new machine that we think will take the roasting community by storm.  We hope he sells a lot of them! 

So when you sip a cup of our coffee, you can do so knowing that you’ve done just a little bit more for the planet than was possible a month ago.

http://www.muddydogcoffee.com/

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