I have to admit it, I'm pretty coffee addicted. And I know that coffee has a pretty high virtual water consumption. As I want to lower my environmental impact on earth I searched for simple ways to get it going first (I really struggle getting vegan, but I'm trying).
I read about the high water consumption and thought that it would be pretty easy to save a lot of water by giving up on coffee.
So here is what I'm planning to do for the next month (if it's working out well, then for longer):
-Not drinking any coffee
-Replace coffee with green tea
As I know that the caffeine in green tea has a higher impact on me (at least in the beginning) I will not compensate every cup of coffee with a cup of green tea. I think this would kill me :-)
Here are the estimated numbers:
-I drink appx. 6 cups of coffee on a work day
-I drink appx. 3 cups of coffee on a free day
-I plan to drink 2-4 cups of green tea on a work day
-I plan to drink 2 cups of green tea on a free day.
Let's assume a month has 21 work days and 9 free days:
-That's 153 cups of coffee a month
-replaced by 60-102 cups of green tea
A cup of coffee has a virtual water consumption of about 140l and a cup of green tea about 30l
That's a virtual water consumption of:
⁃ 21420l for my monthly coffee consumption
⁃ 1800l-3060l for my monthly green tea consumption.
So if everything goes well and I didn't mess up my numbers, I will be able to save appx. 19620l of water per month by only swapping coffee with green tea.
Getting those numbers for one product is pretty easy, but if you want to know how many virtual water you use for your complete diet, it gets pretty tough. So I developed a small tool that helps you with this.
It's called "Vinnie Vegan" and is a telegram bot that sends you a tasty recipe every day along with interesting facts about the environmental impact of the recipe. If you would like to know about the virtual water consumption and the CO2 output of your food, give Vinnie V a try:
Let's get it on! I will keep you updated on my caffeine progress.