Coffee 5/50

Guilty pleasure

This week I decided to get two group contributions done at once, and use the same image for The 50 Images-Project and for The Sunday Challenge.

For The Sunday Challenge the topic was to illustrate guilty pleasure. I first thought I have no such thing. But then I started to think the concept of carbon footprint. From that point of view the whole human life is nothing but one huge guilty pleasure.

Lately in Finnish media it has become common to make the whole nation to feel guilty for eating meat. On news and advertisements it is made clear that everyone should become as a vegan. And the carbon footprint is often mentioned in that context.

So, we can try to calculate what is the carbon footprint of almost anything. In my case I started to wonder what is the carbon footprint of coffee.

As in most of the cases, it is not very straightforward. One should try to take numerous aspects into that equation, like: farming, mill, exportation, roasting, grinding, packaging, distribution, purchasing, consumption and disposal. Further on, one can try to examine what the consumption exactly consist of. It for example makes a huge difference whether you go out to buy your morning coffee from the café, or whether you make it at home. And if you make your coffee at home, then do you wash the cups and pots every day, or just rinse them? One big waste of energy and resources is all the water we use. And do you let the coffee stay long in the coffee maker, or do you put it in the thermos bottle? That also matters!

One way to cause smaller carbon footprint is to start drinking espresso or instant coffee. And one should absolutely give up adding milk, because anything that requires farming animals is absolutely worst thing we can do! Even the way how we boil the water matters. Or give up on coffee or tea entirely, and switch to drink tap water only. Or do like the deceased horse did. Just when it learned not to drink, it passed away.

So, we all are more or less ashamed because of destroying this planet of ours. Sometimes I think it would be better to just "quit". But even the disposal of our remains is going to cause a carbon footprint. So, one reason to keep on living is to help each other to try making our carbon footprint smaller. Sharing information is the least we can do. But to change for example my bad habit to love coffee is much harder thing to do...

And imagine how much energy and resources I used when writing this photo article on laptop, listening music from SoundCloud, and posting this online...

♫ guilty pleasure by Flamingosis at SoundCloud