Coffee vs Pork: carbon footprint

Coffee28.53kg CO₂e / kg
vs
Pork12.31kg CO₂e / kg

Coffee or Pork? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.

Coffee runs about 28.53 kg CO₂e a kilo. Pork runs 12.31.

Coffee is the heavier choice, about 2.3× Pork.

Swap Coffee for Pork and you cut about 16.22 kg a kilo, near 57% off.

Per kilo, that gap is a 95 km drive in a diesel car.

Coffee: Comes from growing and processing the crop, plus whatever it ships in.

Pork: 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.

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Figures from OWID / Poore & Nemecek 2018, licensed CC-BY 4.0.
How we get these numbers: Methodology.