Environmental Impact Associated with the Supply Chain and Production of Grounding and Roasting Coffee through Life Cycle Analysis

• Main Authors: Mario R. Giraldi-Díaz, Lorena De Medina-Salas, Eduardo Castillo-González, Rosario León-Lira
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-12-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: coffee production; life cycle assessment (LCA); carbon; water and energy footprint; environmental impact
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/12/4598

Coffee is the beverage resulting from the infusion of roasted and ground seeds of the coffee fruit. It is one of the most commercialized products in the world and represents a high interest agro-industrial product in Mexico. The demand for this product has grown in great measure in the last decade, thus it is becoming more important to make environmental and energetic evaluations of its manufacturing process. In this sense, life cycle assessment (LCA) is a useful tool for the purposes of this study, as it quantifies the wake of environmental impacts associated to the production and supply chain from its inputs and outputs of the product system. Therefore, the impact categories studied were carbon, energetic, and water footprints. The cultivation phase led to global contributions between 61% and 67% in magnitude for energy and carbon footprints, respectively; meanwhile, the coffee benefit process was the phase with the most contributions to the water footprint (54%). The residual biomass from the product system used as the energy supply within the coffee drying sub-phase represented energy savings of around 41% in comparison to the use of conventional fossil fuels, thus reducing the global impact associated to the system’s product.