Sunday, February 10th, 2008
Go Ancient, Drink Tea Instead of Soda
Have you ever thought about how much energy it takes to get things to the store before you buy them? A lot of thought is going into that kind of thing and there is a term for it, embodied energy. Now lets apply that thinking to that morning fix so many of us have every day, our morning coffee, tea or caffeinated soda. Let’s compare drinking a pot of tea versus 24 ounces of soda every day.
I weighed a couple items around my house to get a start:
- 10 tea bags weighs 1 oz (30g)
- 15 sweetner packets (Splenda) weighs 3/4 oz (20g)
- 24 oz soda in plastic bottle weighs 1lb 10 1/8 oz (739g)
Using 2 tea bags and 3 bags of sweetener for a pot of tea, which is what we use in my house, and a pot a day for a year we end up with 8 lbs per year. Figuring that tea travels 1,500 miles to get to the store via a semi-truck with a 231,800 pound miles per gallon, that works out to 0.052 gallons per pot a day habit per year. Now let’s switch glasses to soda.
Drinking 24 oz of soda instead, works out to 596 lbs or more than 74x the weight of the tea. Now most soda is distributed somewhat locally on speciallized trucks, so let’s figure about 500 miles to get from the distributer to the store. Figuring mid-sized delivery truck with an estimated pound miles per gallon of 117,000, that works out to 2.55 gallons per soda a day habit per year.
So, for every person who chooses to drink a pot of tea instead of 24 ounces of soda each day, about 2.5 gallons of gasoline can be saved each year. A similar calculation could be done substituting coffee in place of tea and the result would be similar because it takes a lot of energy to transport water around the country on trucks.
If just one person out of every 100 members of families in the US (183,000,000 family members in US according to the 2006 Census), switched from soda to tea or coffee that would save 4.6 million gallons per year or over 44,000 tons of carbon dioxide. And this is all without considering some of the attrosities certain cola manufactures have been accussed of or the health benefits to drinking tea instead of soda. You can read more about those at the following links:
- http://www.healingdaily.com/detoxification-diet/soda-pop.htm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_drink
I’ve made some assumptions about the energy used in producing both products. Namely, the energy used to make soda (both packaging and sanitizing bottles) vs preparing tea (both the drying of leaves and boiling of water at home) offset sufficiently. My gut is that the energy to produce the plastic bottles, even with recycling is far more than boiling water for tea and firing the furnace for drying the tea leaves. I also assume that since both require clean drinking water, that the energy in producing water for either option factors out in the equations. If someone has more depth as to the energy put into either of these processes, please share them in the comments. For more about how Pepsi is made, they actually have a useful FAQ. I also assume that the energy to transport either product from the store to home is neglible since the added weight doesn’t matter compared with the rest of the vehicle and groceries.
Now as a final note, you also can save a little money too. I get my name brand tea in bulk from a wholesale club at $8 for 100 packets and my sweetner in 700 count box for $17. For a year I need 730 packets of tea ($58.40) and 1,095 packs of sweetner ($26.59) for a total of $85. For soda, you can almost always get a 2 liter (68 oz) bottle of name brand on sale for $1.25 so you’d need 129 bottles which would cost $161.
Total savings per person per year for tea instead of soda is $76 and 2.5 gallons and 49 pounds of carbon dioxide. Take a trip to the past and have a cup of tea tomorrow morning instead of that bottle of soda.
on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 1:29 am:
Very interesting, I hadn’t thought about this. I may start drinking more tea…