Environmental Issues
Articles
Articles
Exploring & explaining the trends shaping coffee
Get up-to-speed on key issues and topics, in less time than it takes to drink a coffee
Research, legislative and indsutry updates summarised for coffee people.
Tips for coffee people and businesses
Proposals for tackling industry challenges
Perspectives and opinion from across the community
Archive of all articles from across United Baristas
Ideas
One page summaries of key information on important topics from across United Baristas.
Collections
Coffee businesses are people businesses. Managing people is a learnt set of skills. This collection compiles tips for hiring and managing coffee people.
Coffee is both contributes to global warming and is impacted by climate change. This collection compiles articles exploring causes and impacts from crop to cup.
Working in coffee is dynamic, engaging and full of possibilities. This collection compiles articles to help people navigate life and work in coffee.
Running a coffee shop can be challenging, but is ultimately a rewarding job. This collection compiles articles for managers and owners.
Coffee’s scale, reach and connections enables us to play an important role in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals.
Explore articles from across United Baristas by theme.
Series
Exploring how the industry can better communicate speciality coffee’s distinct and vibrant flavours.
Exploring how specialty coffee can cut its carbon emissions, from crop to cup. We want to understand how the industry can play its part in reaching net zero.
Exploring how coffee become more sustainable. We want to understand how specialty coffee can better align itself with the Sustainable Development Goals.
What is coffee’s carbon footprint? What are the most significant contributors? We want to understand the industry’s emissions from crop to cup.
Mini-series exploring the challenges specialty chains face as they grow. We want to understand why some coffee shop businesses survive when others fail.
Follow the development of topics across articles with Series.
News
Latest news from United Baristas.
Why the world is getting warmer
Understanding Climate Change
Before tackling coffee's carbon footprint, get up-to-speed with the fundamentals. Here's five things it's good to know.
Sustainable Development Goals
How can we make specialty coffee more sustainable?
Coffee’s scale, reach and connections enable us to play an important role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. We start a new series by exploring what it means to be sustainable.
Audio
Lisa Lawson
Coffee’s sustainability journey can be supported by the B Corp framework
Dear Green founder explores how the industry can be more sustainable and why it's not always easy having 'green' in your name
Their claims don't stack up
Why KeepCup can’t save the world
United Baristas fact checks KeepCup’s claims for their new Thermal cup.
Audio
Latest Articles
Ideas into action
Let’s meet for coffee at Ensemble
United Baristas is transforming a coffee shop in King's Cross, London. It'll host our events and be a testbed for ideas.
Tasty, tasty coffee
Introducing the Coffee Tasting Framework
United Baristas wants to kickstart a community-wide conversation on how we can better communicate coffee’s distinctive flavours. Better tasting notes are fundamental for the industry’s viable future. More accurate communication can empower consumers and support specialty coffee’s price premium.
Let’s tread more lightly on the earth: United Baristas dramatically cuts its carbon footprint while achieving record growth
We’ve cut our total carbon footprint by making multiple small decisions that cumulatively have had a big effect
Audio
Hot stuff
How espresso machines cause global warming
Reducing coffee’s carbon footprint by tackling the energy consumption of espresso machines.
It's costly and the money is much needed elsewhere
Strengthening the coffee industry by eliminating the reusable cup discount
Here’s why, how we should use the money instead, and why this is a good moment to implement this change.
Audio
Looking at the cost and benefit to lowering environmental impacts through eliminating takeout cups
Learning from the Boston Tea Party experience
Milk Matters: Small changes can dramatically lower your coffee’s carbon footprint
Want to reduce your coffee's environmental impacts? Milk is responsible for the majority of a cup's carbon footprint, so lower your impacts in 2020 by making informed decisions
Your intuition is probably inaccurate
Calculating the Coffee Industry’s Carbon Emissions
Carbon dioxide is colourless, tasteless and odourless, but it’s everywhere and causing global warming. So how do we work out how much carbon is emitted to make a cup of coffee?
Our Digital Carbon Emissions are part of the Coffee Industry’s Environmental Impact
Let's be aware of our online carbon footprint, and how United Baristas is offsetting your use of our services.
With so many crises, what do we focus on?
With environmental pressures continuing to mount, United Baristas starts a series on how the coffee industry can lower its impacts.
Coffee Tasting
Coffee Tasting Framework
Identify & communicate each coffee's distinctive flavours
Discover how to identify a coffee's defining characteristic, understand why some coffees are tastier than others, and recognise the coffee drinkers that will find it appealing.