did you know that some cafes are producing upwards of six tons per week
of carbon dioxide in their cafe only about half a percent of that is paper
cup wastage what's causing the rest of it well find out what it is and what we
can do about it in this video you know one of the first things I wanted to do
when I came to seven miles is to look into what paper cups what impact paper
cups have on the environment it's one of the things I've heard about for a long
time people say oh it's one of the biggest problems of our time we see
images floating across the television screen of trams filled with paper cups
and saying this is amazingly huge amount of waste we've got to do something about
it right now which by the way I do agree with from a cafes perspective or a
coffee shops perspective is that actually a significant portion of the
waste generated from cafe or are there other things that we can go after that
may actually have a better impact on the environment as a whole so one of the
ways that we can do that is by performing what's known as a life cycle
analysis in very simple terms this is what they call the cradle to grave
analysis of everything that happens in any given process I did it on cafes and
coffee shops so it wasn't just on paper cups it was on the cups bacon and egg
rolls it was on the espresso machine and a whole bunch of different categories
and we computed ultimately a big wheel I looked at what the individual carbon
dioxide emissions were from those portions of that wheel we found that
really all of the carbon dioxide footprint of a cafe can be summed up
into three major categories the biggest one is energy as the energy used to
literally heat up the machine to produce water to produce coffee water has one of
the highest heat capacities of any substance known to mankind to heat up
one gram of water one degree Celsius takes about four kilojoules of energy so
all that energy being pumped into boil water
that is by far the biggest impact in terms of carbon dioxide footprint on the
environment the second one after that is milk usage
particularly for the Australian market where 70-80 percent of us are actually
drinking coffee with milk in it milk itself to produce milk actually has a
heavy footprint in the environment in all the cows that are required to
produce all that milk required growing require feeding emit methane which is a
huge surprisingly huge impact on the environment methane is a terrible
greenhouse gas so that actually has a huge impact on the environment you can
talk about that in a second and the third major one is is food wastage food
and water wastage food waste prefers to stuff that's literally uneaten thrown in
the bin ends up in a tube in a very similar way that paper cups will end up
in a tip those ones that can't be recycled the waste here is generated or
the carbon dioxide footprint from the waste is generated by those materials
breaking down on the tip so especially larger chain organic molecules
eventually breaking down into smaller things of carbon carbon dioxide carbon
monoxide and methane which is ch4 as well as the next portion to talk about
is well if these three things are the biggest impact other things that we can
do to minimize the impact because again small changes in any big category will have
much greater impact than big changes in any small category so one thing that has
a huge impact on the environmental penalty of a cafe and restaurant is
literally just turn the Machine off at night we found that in our analysis that
if you have five hours between service in other words if you have five hours
between when you finish service in the afternoon or the evening and by the time
you wake up and start serving coffee in the morning you will actually save a
particular amount of energy in fact it equates to $325 saving off your energy
bill now of course you don't simply have to turn the Machine up at night to get
the savings you can there are machines out there that have built-in timers you
can buy a built-in timers or buy timers to build into the machine that turned
the Machine off automatically there are machines with eco mode and by the way
those eco modes are quite effective they reduce the energy usage by half when
they're operating, so it's quite an effective way of doing
things let's move on to milk what can we do here all right now obviously it's not
just the milk that goes into the cup that's wasted or used or consumed it's
the milk that goes down the sink as well and one of the interesting findings we
had here that kind of ties in with some of the work we've done in automation is
that you can actually reduce your milk wastage by dozens of litres a day by
simply implementing accurate milk dosing systems. It doesn't have to be
as as expensive as an Ubermilk, it can be the juggler system it can be even as
simple as putting a line marker inside of your coffee jugs to make sure you
fill it up to the right level every single time and making sure that your
people fill it up to that level or that you yourself are filling up to that
level I'm say reducing your milk wastage I mean that that would go huge way and
said litres a day dozens of litres a day and that's again hundreds of dollars
every single month that you literally tipping down the drain finally food
wastage now I'm not a chef I'm not someone that knows a whole lot about how
not to waste food aside from trying to minimize what you put in the bin so I'm
not going to go too far here but suffice it to say that if you can come up with
menus that utilize more of a whole portion of the product whole fruits all
vegetables hope parts of an animal the creative ways of minimizing waste that
would go a long way and again way more than focusing on paper cups
now the question might be asked where does this fit in with the entire
lifecycle analysis of coffee I mean right because you got to get coffee from
one side of the world to the other surely trucking tons of coffee around
the world both trucking on donkeys and on boats is gonna have a huge much
bigger impact on the environment then then you know actually drinking of the
coffee producing and drinking coffee well we did it it's like a broader
lifecycle analysis after a good display analysis to answer this question and as
you'll see from this graph, consumption of coffee dwarfs every other
category so so ultimately I mean the power is in our hands to make small
changes to have a bigger impact on the environment it's in the hands of
baristas it's in the hand of cafe owners and roasteries there are a few other
ideas that we have but you can find a whole lot more about that in the blog
that we've written we've written two blogs now on this particular subject
that are available our website and should be available in a link in this
video if you have some questions you can feel free to put them in the in the
comments below any analysis you might have done things that I've missed
to post them any interesting ideas are always open to ideas and until next time
I'm out of a car from the coffee science and Education Center at Seven Miles have an
awesome day