Coffee: carbon footprint per kg
Live factor value
8.4 kgCO2e per kg
Source: Agribalyse (ADEME/INRAE, France), 3.1 (revision 1). Factor set agribalyse-3.1-r1.
Ground coffee carries one of the larger per-kilogram figures in Agribalyse — the live value is below — and it is also one of the most misleading numbers in the database if you stop there. Nobody consumes a kilogram of coffee in a sitting; a cup uses somewhere around seven grams, so the per-cup footprint is a tiny fraction of the headline.
The farm is where most of it comes from: coffee is grown in the tropics, often on land converted from forest, with fertiliser use and wet processing both contributing. What happens in your kitchen barely registers next to that — but the milk you add can rival the coffee itself, which is the part most people get backwards.
Worked example
A 250 g bag of ground coffee (~35 cups): 0.25 × 8.4 = 2.1 kgCO2e.
Measure your own with the free food calculator.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the footprint of a single cup of coffee?
- Divide the live per-kilogram figure by roughly 140 — about seven grams of grounds per cup. Any milk you add is a separate item and is often the larger half of a flat white.
- Is instant coffee lower-carbon than ground?
- Instant uses less coffee per cup but adds an energy-intensive freeze-drying step. Agribalyse publishes instant only as a ready-to-drink beverage rather than as a powder, so this source cannot settle the per-kilogram comparison and we will not borrow a figure from another study to do it.