According to a recent report in New Scientist, instant coffee is better for the environment than filter coffee. Dr Dave Reay has calculated that filter coffee has a much larger carbon footprint than its instant counterpart.
I must say I’m a little confused with the report’s findings. Surely as instant coffee undergoes far more processes than filter coffee, before it reaches our cup, that it would require more energy to produce. Essentially, instant coffee is second-hand coffee: it’s brewed in a factory, then dehydrated before being aromatised and packaged, ready to be brewed again by the end consumer.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to read the original report (its not available for free on the internet), just an article on it in the Telegraph. So I’m not entirely sure what assumptions Dr Reay has based his calculations on. It would be interesting to know what he classes as an average cup of filter coffee.
Filter Coffee - certainly better tasting
Photo by Elke Wetzig
Of course, with filter coffee there is the need for extra brewing equipment in the home – some kind of filter. Paper filters are only used once, so there aren’t particularly environmentally friendly – other then they do decompose. Metal filters, well looked after, will last many years, but require more energy to produce in the first place.
Is the manufacture of these filters included in Dr Reay’s calculations? And if they are, are the energy costs of producing the additional equipment needed to make instant coffee, in the factory, also included?
One thing mentioned in the Telegraph article which could be key to Dr Reay’s calculations is:
“Instant coffee is much less bulky than filter and so requires less energy to transport over long distances from producers including Ethiopia and Kenya”.
From this, it sounds like Dr Reay thinks that Kenya and Ethiopia export end products for the UK consumer – instant and filter coffee are produced in a factory in East Africa and then exported to here in the UK. But this isn’t the case. Coffee producing countries export green beans. It’s not until they reach the UK that they undergo further processes such as roasting, grinding and packaging. So the fact that filter packaging is bulkier than instant packaging, is only going to affect the last couple of hundred miles on the journey to the consumer.
I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who’s read the complete report or has any views on the instant vs. filter debate.
Tags: filter coffee, instant coffee
[...] month I wrote a post on whether instant coffee was really better for the environment than filter. Now I wasn’t negative about environmental issues, but I thought I should still play it safe and [...]