Together with Gerrit Vorhoff from Carbotech AG, an environmental consulting firm, we have developed a CO2 calculator for coffee roasteries.
Tobias Milz, our in-house CO2 expert, worked intensively with Gerrit to calculate the environmental footprint of our coffee roastery. The result is a CO2 calculator that we have now made available online, and we want to encourage other roasteries to calculate their own footprint.
Most emissions occur where we are not present on a daily basis: in coffee production. Therefore, anyone who invests in sustainable production conditions has a major lever for making coffee more environmentally friendly.
However, a roastery is where it is; it is stationary and requires gas, shipping boxes, packaging materials, and sometimes flights to coffee-growing countries are necessary, while employees might commute by car.
So, what can we as coffee roasteries improve where we are, with what we have, or perhaps by addressing what we are overusing? In this conversation, Gerrit and Tobi describe how to build a CO2 calculator in the first place, explain that CO2 is only one part of an environmental analysis, and discuss why we cannot produce products in a climate-neutral way.
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Coffee is part of climate change. We all have a say in whether it becomes more of a solution or part of the problem.
