Preserve 2 Square Feet of Trees Per Cup of Coffee

It's National Coffee Day! Look for one of these certified coffees to help protect forests and wildlife with each cup.

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Photo: Robert Goodier

By Dan Shapley

Sept. 29 is National Coffee Day. (Who knew?) Here's something simple you can do to preserve trees every morning: Drink shade-grown coffee.

When it comes to coffee, there are several labels you can look for: organic, Fair Trade, bird friendly or shade-grown. Each label is third-party verified and means something slightly different.

USDA Organic means that the coffee wasn't grown using pesticides, chemical fertilizers or genetically modified seeds.
Fair Trade-certified means that workers were paid a fair wage and not subjected to unhealthy farming practices, like excessive use of toxic pesticides.
Bird Friendly and Rainforest Alliance-certified shade grown coffee labels mean that coffee was grown using traditional methods so that rain forest trees on coffee plantations are preserved, rather than clear-cut. (The "bird friendly" part comes in because many of the songbirds that frequent U.S. backyards spend winters in South and Central American rain forests, including shade-grown coffee plantations.)

Choosing any certified roast is a good choice for the environment, compared with typical coffee, which is doused with pesticides and grown on land that has been clear-cut.

The Arbor Day Foundation did the math for The Daily Green, and found that each cup of shade grown coffee preserves two square feet of rain forest.

To find shade-grown "bird friendly" coffee (certified by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center) or Rainforest Alliance, look for the labels below at right, and consider these brands: