| Subtracting Carbon with a Cup of Tea? |
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| Written by Heather McKee | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Saturday, 29 March 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Novice nonprofit CarbonLabels.org has certified its first products that are actually carbon negative – two types of tea from Guayaki, a U.S. company which imports yerba mate, a wildly popular South American tea. The labeling group says that by drinking Guayaki’s shade-grown tea, you are actually removing carbon from the atmosphere. 573 grams of carbon dioxide, to be exact, per 16 ounce bag. Okay, so it’s only as much as a flea farts in a year, but Guayaki’s interests in rainforest and indigenous community preservation in South America are worthy of note. The carbon negativity of the teas assumes that the entire carbon absorbing rainforest (under which the yerba mate is grown) would not exist without the mate plantation. And in a region whose rainforests have dwindled throughout the decades due to cattle and palm oil spreads, amongst other things, this is a reasonable assumption.
In fact, the protection of the 12, 500-acre Itabo Preserve in Paraguay is entirely funded by a 300-acre area of the rainforest devoted to shade-grown yerba mate production for Guayaki. And in Argentina, the company is working with local farmers to convert conventional sun-grown operations into shade-grown, by reforesting with native species.
Because of conscious choices of consumers who look for labels like shade-grown and fair-trade, mate farmers can collect nearly twice as much in payment for shade-grown tea. And if this new carbon subtracting label doesn’t take right away (did I say that the website for the labeling group isn’t even totally up yet?) maybe they could sell carbon credits instead.
Via Guayaki and the Daily Green
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It's true what our moms said...we are what we eat. In fact, it's truer than they thought. What I eat doesn't just affect me anymore, it affects all of us.
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