Chicken vs Coffee: carbon footprint
Chicken or Coffee? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Chicken runs about 9.87 kg CO₂e a kilo. Coffee runs 28.53.
Coffee is the heavier choice, about 2.9× Chicken.
Swap Coffee for Chicken and you cut about 18.66 kg a kilo, near 65% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 109 km drive in a diesel car.
Chicken: Cows and sheep burp methane and need a lot of land and feed, which is why red meat towers over everything else here.
Coffee: Comes from growing and processing the crop, plus whatever it ships in.
Per-kilo numbers skip portion size and how the food was farmed, so take them as the shape of things, not the last word.
More match-ups
Figures from OWID / Poore & Nemecek 2018, licensed CC-BY 4.0.
How we get these numbers: Methodology.