It’s National Coffee Day! For 64% of Americans, they can’t wake up without that invigorating boost of caffeine (for the other 36% it tastes like dirt). From the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “Coffee is the most widely traded tropical product, with up to 25 million farming households globally accounting for 80 percent of world output. Production is concentrated in developing countries, where coffee accounts for a sizeable share of export earnings and provides a key source of livelihood for households.”
The average American drinks 3.1 cups of coffee coming to a total of over 400 million cups of coffee across America every day. This is about 146 billion cups of coffee per year. But how much water goes into making your morning cup of joe? According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 140 liters or about 37 gallons if the metric system isn’t your thing. This is how much water it takes to process and transport enough beans for a single cup of coffee (we’ll be generous and call the 16 ounces of water you drink it with a rounding error).
Doing some quick math on the previous statistics brings us to the conclusion that to make the coffee drunk in just one day by the US alone requires 46 billion liters or 14.8 billion gallons of water. To give a comparison of this amount, an Olympic-sized swimming pool contains 660,000 gallons of water. So basically, every day, around 22,222.22 swimming pools of water is used to produce the coffee that is consumed in the US alone.
Now it is quite apparent that humans (at least 64% of them) can’t operate without their morning caffeine kick so how do we keep the coffee flowing as water problems happen more often? One solution is to reduce industries’ water usage by creating closed-loop industries or treating industrial wastewater so it can be used for farming. IX Power is doing its part in treating water so it can be used in closed loop industry or to increase agricultural water!
Learn more about us at www.ixpower.com
Facts on Coffee from The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: www.fao.org/markets-and-trade/commodities/coffee/en/