How to Roast Coffee Without Burning the Planet (or Coffee)

Walk into the lob­by of Heir­loom Roast­ers in Oak­land, Cal­i­for­nia, and you’re pre­sent­ed with two doors.

Through door num­ber one you’ll find the facility’s main roast­ing space, a cav­ernous ware­house where roar­ing indus­tri­al-sized equip­ment turns green cof­fee beans vary­ing shades of brown. Behind the sec­ond door is a small­er room that is help­ing chart Heirloom’s future. Inside it sit 16 new Bell­wether Cof­fee roast­ing machines. They’re sleek, qui­et and — most impor­tant — electric.

It’s dif­fi­cult to assign an exact car­bon foot­print to the $200 bil­lion cof­fee indus­try. It’s also hard to pic­ture that foot­print, or at least hard­er than pic­tur­ing the pol­lu­tion belch­ing out of tailpipes. Emis­sions tied to cof­fee pro­duc­tion vary, and toss­ing milk in the mix dri­ves them up. But an aver­age cup of Joe comes with emis­sions of rough­ly 400 grams (a lit­tle less than a pound) of car­bon diox­ide equiv­a­lent. Fif­teen per­cent of that is tied to the roast­ing process, with the rest large­ly com­ing from grow­ing and trans­port­ing beans.

To read the full arti­cle, please vis­it: Bloomberg