A hot cup of coffee is the perfect start to the day for millions of people around the world. But with the first sip it’s easy to forget how much work is behind it.
From how farmers cultivate and harvest the coffee plants, to grinding and roasting, there are many critical and labor-intensive steps involved in coffee production. Like all industrial processes, it often consumes a lot of land, water and energy.
This means there is increasing scrutiny of the sustainability of the bean-to-cup journey – something that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the bosses of some of the world’s largest coffee companies.
“We need to change our development model,” Andrea Illy said at the World Economic Forum earlier this month, citing the “extractive model” of the present and past.
The chairman of Italian coffee giant Illycaffe, speaking out in broad terms, said the current system is depleting natural resources and producing an “infinite” amount of residue.
These “polluted and accumulated in the biosphere, eventually suffocating it and preventing the biosphere from regenerating itself,” he added.
“The idea is that we need to change that model and create a new ‘bio-mimicking’ model that works like nature and uses only renewable energy…possibly solar power.”
“We’re talking about the energy transition, but it’s … a prerequisite for a much bigger transition, which is the environmental one,” Illy also said to CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick at the WEF panel.
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Illy’s argument feeds into the concept of circular economy. The idea has gained traction in recent years, with many companies around the world trying to operate in a way that minimizes waste and encourages reuse.
Maria Mendiluce, CEO of the We Mean Business Coalition, also spoke at the WEF panel. She emphasized that ideas related to circularity are not limited to food production.
“I don’t think we’ve fully exercised the Force [the] Circular economy – also in the industrial systems,” she said, adding that now is “the right moment for it”.
Mendiluce further elaborated on the rare materials required for the transition to a more sustainable economy, with specific reference to Original Equipment Manufacturers or OEMs, such as: B. Automaker.
“When you talk to the OEMs, [the] The circular economy is at the heart of the strategy because we need to recycle these materials – cobalt, nickel, etc. – to be able to supply batteries for the future,” she said.
Slowly but surely, companies are developing processes to recycle materials used in technologies critical to the energy transition.
Last November, for example, Swedish battery company Northvolt announced that it had manufactured its first battery cell with “100% recycled nickel, manganese and cobalt”.
And a few months earlier, in June 2021, General Electric’s renewable energy arm and cement giant Holcim struck an agreement to research wind turbine blade recycling.
Returning to the issue of how nature might affect business practices, Dickon Pinner, senior partner and co-head of McKinsey Sustainability, described nature as “like the balance sheet of the planet.”
“There are so many dependencies of the real economy on nature that many companies [and] Governments haven’t fully realized that yet,” he said. “The interdependence is… so great.”
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