“The average cup of coffee takes 46 litres to make,” explains Victoria Alleyne, “It’s so much, but no one thinks about it. Once people know, they can start to make it a difference.” Alleyne is the founder of Full Footprint, an organization devoted to measuring the ecological, carbon and water footprints of common goods and services, like coffee.
For Earth Day, Alleyne partnered with the Centre for Social Innovation Cafe to educate members of the CSI community and the general public. The Centre for Social Innovation Cafe uses coffee from Merchants of Green, which offers a lower-impact product to coffee shops across the GTA. Coffee drinkers were offered a 3.5 centimeter-square piece of paper, representing the area of land that is saved on each cup of coffee by using ecological methods. Full Footprint also offered information about carbon, ecological, and water offsets as part of the day’s educational component.
Members of the CSI community got involved as well. Small Change Fund, Green Majority Media, and Our Horizons were all present at the event. “CSI members came out and gave some advice and guidance on how to make change,” Alleyne says.
For Alleyne, the 260 cups of coffee consumed that day represent more than just a caffeine kick. “Using coffee from a more environmentally friendly vendor resulted in preventing 20kg of carbon from entering into the atmosphere, saved 1 metre squared of land from having its trees and other plant life cut down, and saved 130 litres of water along the life cycle of the coffee,” she says. Full Footprint plans to purchase offsets to take care of the rest of the day’s environmental impact.
As for Alleyne, she’s more of a tea drinker. But, she says, “A lot of people in co-working spaces identify that coffee fuels their change. It’s an easy way to communicate the message.”