Coffee vs Farmed shrimp: carbon footprint

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

Coffee runs about 28.53 kg CO₂e a kilo. Farmed shrimp runs 26.87.

It's close. Coffee and Farmed shrimp land in roughly the same place.

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

Farmed shrimp: Farmed fish and shrimp pay for feed, energy to run the ponds, and sometimes cleared mangroves.

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.