The Cost of Coffee

After working in Starbucks for half a year, I have the process of making lattes down to a science. Steam the milk, queue up the espresso shots, pour into the cup, place the lid on and give it to the customer. A typical eight hour workday will have gone by and I’ll have made roughly 200 lattes. Now here’s the kicker; it takes 53 gallons of water to make a single latte, which is about the equivalent of water you use for a ten minute shower. It plays out like an elementary math problem; if one latte takes 53 gallons of water to make, how much does 200? The answer is 10,600 gallons.

How much water is in your latte?

Now for those of you not familiar with the typical Starbucks drinks, there are plenty of other choices such as cappuccinos, frappuccinos, teas and an abundance of flavored coffees. Most of these drinks have even more ingredients to them than a simple latte, increasing the amount of water used to make them.  The 10,600 gallons of water has just exponentially increased. If you factor in the thousands of Starbucks nationwide, each day produces an incredibly high amount of water, water that we never realized we are using.

There are better ways for your coffee consumption needs. For example, buying a travelers mug for your coffee allows you to use the same cup every day. This cuts back on the amount of water that would be wasted to make a paper cup and at Starbucks, you even get a discount for bringing in your own mug. You save money and help conserve water by doing this.

Next time you grab a cup of coffee, just think about how much water went into making that drink, and what you could do to leave a smaller water footprint on the world.