It's a fair cup...

11:21am Monday 28th January 2008

Green tea may be the environmentalist's favourite colour - but does it have the planet-loving credentials to match? SARAH LEWIS sits down with a nice cup of cha and a fair-trade biscuit to find out.

The coffee industry is worth some $80 billion worldwide. It is the second largest trading commodity on the planet after oil and in Britain we drink 70 million cups of it a day.

Tea is similarly placed in sheer quantity - in 2003, the world produced 3.15 million tonnes of leaves.

Of that production, only 3,500 tonnes of tea was produced to environmentally- sound standards and only 4.3 million of those UK cups of coffee were fairly traded.

Yet even the big companies have cottoned on to the fact going eco with your tea and coffee is one of the easiest ways of starting a green makeover.

Early last year, fast food giant McDonald's - who are accused by Greenpeace of being responsible for thousands of acres of Amazon rainforest clearance - pledged to exclusively sell coffee certified by the Rainforest Alliance, an independent non-profit organisation which offers seals of approval for strict compliance to environmental and social guidelines.

Even the ubiquitous Starbucks has joined the fray, claiming to be North America's largest purchaser of fairtrade coffee and promising you can go into any Starbucks in the world and get a fair trade drink, as long as you ask for it.

Sadly, your fair-trade aspirations alone won't secure you a particularly planet-friendly drink.

You will get it in a single-use cup, with java jacket and napkin, which for one cup of c o f f e e will not cause landfills to overflow, but how many do you drink every week?

If every person in The Argus offices drank three cups of tea or coffee a day from disposable cups, we alone would get through nearly 1,000 cups every working week. That is 52,000 a year.

And don't forget the agrochemicals used in farming. According to the WWF, the chemicals used on tea plantations destroy soil bio-diversity, with as much as 70 per cent of all soil organisms lost on some plantations. They also pollute rivers, killing not only fish but harming the animals which depend on them for food - and the people who use the river for water.

Coffee comes with similar problems.

Massive plantations with only one crop (monocultures) destroy the local ecosystem causing huge biodiversity loss.

Shade-grown coffee, rather than sun-grown, while still causing some loss of wildlife, is on the whole a much friendlier method of coffee production.

One of the biggest problems with greening your brew is that of buying local. The UK is not well known for its capacity to grow tea leaves or coffee beans, so finding them at your local farmers' market might be a little difficult.

Choosing between coffee from Costa Rica or Ethiopia won't dent your carbon footprint much, but making sure it is produced ethically will.