Coffee Roasting And The Impact On The Environment
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How can a certified fair trade and organic cup of coffee still be a source of major environmental and social problems? After all, the social issues are dealt with through fair trade, by paying coffee growers a decent, higher-than-subsistence price for their crops. And the environmental problems should have been handled through the growers learning to farm with organic methods. Yet it's during all the steps afterwards of hulling, coffee roasting and so on that the problems appear.
While fair trade and certified organic coffee is frequently handled conscientiously at the level of cultivation and harvest, you may be surprised to learn that there can then be problems at different processing levels.
Before roasting even takes place, the pulp of the fruit needs to be removed to reveal the seed, what we know as the coffee bean. When hulling is done via wet methods, massive amounts of water are used, and waterways can be contaminated with organic pollutants. Yet dry hulling methods produce a lower quality product.
Although it sounds so innocuous, coffee roasting is quite an involved process and produces pollutants as byproducts. The smoke alone from the roasting carries alcohols, organic acids, and nitrogen and sulfur compounds. Most roasters use ovens that are powered by natural gas. And there is usually a second oven meant to clean the air of all the pollutants, which adds to the gas used and the CO2 emissions. Even though steps are now being taken to use just one oven and even recapture the heat from the cleaned air, your morning cup of fresh coffee is definitely looking less green by the minute.
Obviously, organic blend coffee still carries a lot of non-organic baggage. In fact, many claim that the environmentally unfriendly methods used for coffee roasting, hulling and all the other processes completely wipe out whatever good was done at the organic farming level. Steps are slowly being taken to find better hulling methods for the beans, and to create ovens that won't use so much energy or emit pollutants. But changing the coffee industry into a completely green industry is clearly going to take some time.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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