Coffee vs Lamb: carbon footprint
Coffee28.53kg CO₂e / kg
vs
Lamb39.72kg CO₂e / kg
Coffee or Lamb? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Coffee runs about 28.53 kg CO₂e a kilo. Lamb runs 39.72.
Lamb is the heavier choice, about 1.4× Coffee.
Swap Lamb for Coffee and you cut about 11.19 kg a kilo, near 28% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 66 km drive in a diesel car.
Coffee: Comes from growing and processing the crop, plus whatever it ships in.
Lamb: Cows and sheep burp methane and need a lot of land and feed, which is why red meat towers over everything else here.
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.